He calculates how long he has been back in the UK by the fact that he has "observed seven springs. I've watched them extremely carefully and have tried to capture as much of it as I could. One year we missed the hawthorn flower because we were away for a week in May. Another time we were supposed to go to LA in June and the hawthorn hadn't arrived before we left. So this year I refused to leave Bridlington even for a day."
"I first realised I was missing the seasons when walking through Holland Park every morning while sitting for Lucian Freud. It's a great subject for artists, but how do you record it? It is too slow for movies, but too fast for a single picture, so it takes quite a few pictures to show the changes. But that's true of most things. And it's been a remarkable discovery. I wouldn't have thought this was a subject even three years ago. But when I found it I realised straightaway it was something that could be developed."
"To get something fresh you have to go back to nature. When they say the landscape genre has been done, that is impossible. You can't be tired of nature. It is just our way of looking at it that we are tired of. So get a new way of looking at it."
Excerpts from an interview by Nicholas Wroe: David Hockney: a life in art
