At long last Bradford Council is going to honour the world's most popular living artist, Bradford-born David Hockney. Here, he tells us what the Freedom of the City means to him. Jim Greenhalf reports.

UNSURPRISINGLY, David Hockney spent most of yesterday in his West London studio drawing (he's usually working at something or other).

He's spent the last month doing a series of 12 pencil portraits of National Gallery attendants for a special exhibition in the summer.

He'd just finished the final portrait and was speaking to me on the telephone when nine technical people from the National Gallery arrived and set Stanley and Boodge - his two dachshunds - barking.

Hockney, who loves to talk about art but sounds a bit bemused when asked to talk about his own reactions to honours and titles, asked for time out.

"I'll get rid of these people soon," he laughed, having just told me that, yes, he was proud of the honour. He was touched, flattered, he hadn't expected it really, it was very good.

"I don't know what else to say," he said.

So I asked him if, in return for the Freedom of the City, he would be willing to do something for Bradford, perhaps do something with his art on a small building over three or four years.

"Well, why not? Yes," he replied. "It would need to be stimulating," he added, referring to the project.

Returning to the city of his birth and the Freedom of the City he said: "I always thought it was a fine place and that it gets better, doesn't it? If people have confidence in themselves. They should. It can't be imposed on people, they have got to get it. They could be encouraged by things like this.

"I have always had confidence in myself. Bradford has always encouraged me, after all I got a grant from Bradford to go to art school so I have always been grateful in a way."

Because he's now a multi-millionaire and lives in California, people forget that Hockney came from a family of seven, was raised in a terraced house in Eccleshill and painted his way to fame, fortune and acclaim.

He did so in Los Angeles, London, Paris and latterly Yorkshire. He made his own way in the world; but fame and fortune has never in all the years I've known him made him stand-offish or pompous.

"David has always acknowledged his roots. Although he has lived away from Bradford for 40 years and travelled the world widely he has regularly returned to the city and district and helped in their promotion," his brother Paul, former Lord Mayor of Bradford, told the T&A.

It's true.

Last year at the Pompidou Centre in Paris I had the unusual experience of seeing in one gallery all three of Hockney's paintings of the Grand Canyon together with his double-canvas of Salts Mill and some of his Yorkshire landscapes.

As Paul Hockney commented at the time: "There's more of Bradford in Paris than there is Paris in Bradford."

Hockney is an international star but Bradford has been mighty slow to acknowledge his light. As far back as 1987, when Jonathan Silver opened the 1853 Hockney Gallery at desolate Salts Mill, it was clear that something enormously exciting and important was happening.

Over the next ten years of life left to him, Silver brought together Hockney's work and high-technology electronics which in turn brought visitors and created upwards of 2,000 new jobs.

Paul Hockney is right to stress that Salts now contains the largest permanent exhibition of Hockney's work anywhere in the world. Beyond that, however, Salts remains the most startling example of evolutionary economic regeneration through the unlikely combination of arts and commerce - a fact which Prince Charles did not fail to note when he visited Salts in October 1996.

Publicly honouring Hockney in this way has great potential significance for Bradford which is now in the throes of working out a coherent approach to the arts in preparation for its bid to become European City of Culture in 2008.

Until now, Bradford's response to its native talent has left a lot to be desired (artists have gone off to Dean Clough at Halifax to find studio space, for example).

Hockney's Freedom of the City could be the start of something big for the rest of the arts in Bradford, providing the opportunity is seized and acted imaginatively upon; it could act as a catalyst for a much needed change of attitude and approach in how the city responds to the talent and creativity of its people.

In the words of Robin Silver, managing director of Salts Mill: "As a flag for Bradford you really cannot get much better than that."

David Hockney is scheduled to fly back to Los Angeles on Friday. The next time he comes back to Britain, and to Bradford, is likely to be for the ceremony to receive his Freeman status at City Hall.

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