David Hockney doesn’t do things by half. The industrious artist tells the Serpentine gallery supremo Hans Ulrich Obrist that he wants to paint 1,000 portraits of his friends, family plus art world movers and shakers. With 82 portraits (and one still-life) by Hockney now on show at London’s Royal Academy of Arts (until 2 October), there's plenty of scope for a bigger show in the future. The interview in Obrist’s new book, Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects, which is published by Penguin, included a note of self-doubt about another grand project, however. Hockney feared that it could be a bit of a problem to autograph all of the copies of A Bigger Book for his friend, publisher and Los Angeles neighbour, Benedikt Taschen. Taschen's forthcoming mega monograph on Hockney, which it describes as a “Sumo-sized career retrospective, curated and signed by the artist”, is due out this winter.
