This is a story about a friendship of the most fulfilling and meaningful kind, about friends who talked daily and celebrated holidays together with family. They traveled the world together, but reveled in just hanging out, enjoying a good laugh while watching Larry David’s shows on TV. How fortunate for Bing McGilvray and David Hockney to have such a friendship of caring, warmth, delight, and intellectual exchange.
Bing and I chatted eight days after his close friend of 48 years—David Hockney, the celebrated artist—died on June 11, 2026, at the age of 88. Our conversation was intermittently punctuated by Bing’s ringtone, The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Hey, oh, listen what I say, oh,” as friends reached out to express their condolences and check on him. “It’s been a tough week, but I’m okay,” Bing reassured me. “There’s been lot of love coming.” I had offered to reschedule our interview, set a month earlier, but Bing wanted to keep the date, in part to reflect.
The Staff Photographer and I met up with Bing at Manship Artists Residency, in Gloucester, MA, where he’s preparing to mount the exhibit HOCKNEY REPRODUCTION(S): A Celebration of the Life and Art of David Hockney (1937–2026). The exhibit will run from September 11 to October 18, 2026, and will be accompanied by numerous talks, screenings, and events. You can find Bing’s series about David Hockney, written for Cape Ann COSMOS, here.
When we spoke, Bing was not sure if the loss of his friend had fully hit him yet. He talked about David in the present tense—which you will notice in our interview—as he described their conversations about art, their shared history, and their numerous adventures together. This story is in large part about his friendship with David Hockney, but Bing is worthy of a Palate & Palette story of his own. He writes poetically about art and creates “BinGOgrams,” distinct digital images:
Last year, Bing curated a hippie-lovefest event featuring the writer-artist-musician-activist Ed Sanders and an extraordinary “glyphs box” of Ed’s artwork. The Gloucester House probably never saw such a collective of tattooed subversives, artsy ladies, artists, and grey-haired probable Woodstock attendees who showed up to hear Ed sing and read poetry. For me, the best part was seeing Bing’s gleeful expression throughout the event. He was among his people and loving Ed Sanders’ rare and spirited performance, which the enthusiastic crowd also appreciated.
Bing carries deep affection for what he calls the “bohemian culture in Gloucester” and is knowledgeable about its history. He’s surrounded by a close-knit group of creatives on Cape Ann and beyond. He educated me about Reverend Richard Emmanuel and introduced me to Paul Cary Goldberg, whom I wrote about here. Bing is a friend of quilt and performance artist Michael C. Thorpe, whom I wrote about here, and he’s led me to some of my favorite interviews.
I’ve known Rebecca [Reynolds, Executive Director, Manship Artists Residency] since the late 1990s when she worked at the MFA, and I was a guard there [more about that later]. Recently, we had been talking about what I would like to do for a residency at Manship. [The Manship Artists Residency provides time and space for up to 30 artists a year and has supported these artists.] Most of what I make, which I call “Planet of the Apps,” are photographs I alter on my phone [more about that later too], but I never thought of exhibiting them.
Then I thought about the theme of “Manship-Friendship” as I was looking through items I’ve collected and what I have of David’s. I realized I’ve got a lot of Hockney stuff—posters, books, prints, faxes—that together, would make a great show.
It started that way, but then we were able to get quite a few posters, about 25, from David’s studio in Los Angeles and some from Salts Mill. [Salts Mill is a former textile mill that David’s friend Jonathan Silver transformed into a cultural center. Located in Saltaire, West Yorkshire, near Bradford, England, David Hockney’s hometown, Salts Mill features one of the largest permanent collections of his art.] There are almost 100 posters in the show now, in addition to prints, fax collages, rare books and catalogs, photos, movies, and a variety of other media.
Charlie Scheips, a longtime friend of mine and David’s, also had pieces he saved, and those will be in the show. The show grew organically into something much bigger than I originally conceived.
He’s created many of me. He had a show called 82 Portraits and 1 Still-Life—the still life was because somebody didn’t show up for their portrait sitting. That show included four portraits of me, and when I saw the exhibit, I realized I only have prints of two of them.
It’s intimate, and even if there’s an assistant in the background, it’s this soundless experience with not much talking. With David, the intensity is so strong, I feel like he’s looking right into my soul. He can capture little nuances of expressions. [Note the use of present tense, capturing Bing’s continuing sense of togetherness.]
I don’t know the exact number. David also made photo collages. One day, maybe in 1982, we went to an event in Ojai, CA, and stopped at this roadside place called The Old Time Cafe. He took a number of photos of me and used them to make Bing at The Old Time Café, a collage of 12 photos.
Many years later, when I wanted to see it, I called David’s studio manager, and he found it within 10 minutes! David’s work is well-documented. He knew early on the importance of dating each work. He knew Picasso dated everything he made. His studio has been working on a catalogue raisonné, which is an enormous project, so the documentation has made that easier.
Absolutely. Picasso was someone he emulated perhaps the most. David wasn’t in competition with his contemporaries. He was kind of in competition with Picasso, yet with this enormous reverence. From the get-go, David had unbelievable assurance about his talent and about where he was taking it.
I had just moved to LA. I saw David Hockney by David Hockney in a bookstore, and I was blown away! It was what I had been looking for. He could draw and paint with great versatility, and I loved the vibrant colors of his paintings.
Then I made a point to meet David, and I did. [Bing sent letters to David’s gallery and slipped notes under the studio door until David called and invited him to visit.]
I had studied art at UMass Amherst and was an aspiring cartoonist. The professors were refugees from the 1960s art world. They were teaching minimalism, conceptualism, and abstract art, which was all very interesting, but drawing was not that important to them. As a cartoonist, I needed to learn how to draw better, but it wasn’t really being taught. I learned on my own. [Bing published cartoons in Los Angeles and Boston publications for a time, but tired of lugging cartoons around during his itinerant life and just makes digital images now, stored in the cloud.]
I remember it vividly. The first thing I said was, “I just got out of art school, and I’d never heard of you. I saw your book, David Hockney by David Hockney, and I’d never seen such amazing drawings and paintings.”
He was happy to hear that because he thought, “The book’s working; it’s getting my work in front of people.” He often said, “I have the vanity of an artist. I want my work to be seen.”
Yes. It was a remarkable moment. He had this long painting of Santa Monica Boulevard on the wall. As I was speaking to him, he asked his assistant to place a new canvas with the same dimensions over the painting. Then he drew the wavy line from one end to the other. [Check out the painting here.]
We became friends. It was gradual, and I’d pop in at least once every two weeks. I think that besides me being rather cute, I was talking about ideas that he was thinking about in his own work.
He was a mentor, and he became a dear friend. He’s been a loyal friend to me through all the ups and downs and craziness of my life. He was always there for me. I think he saw in me something I didn’t even see in myself.
[When I pressed Bing on what that might have been, he said perhaps some untapped intelligence, and that David enjoyed his unique insights on art.]
Yeah. It’s amazing to think he’s gone. I just want to call him up now and say, “I’m having this interview. Say hello to Amy.” [That would have been amazing, but just spending time with Bing was great.]
I remember saying to David that I never did well in art history, but I loved going to the classes and looking at the pictures. I couldn’t remember all the names and dates and this “ism” and that “ism.” I said, “I don’t care that much about that. I want to know how the artists made the pictures.”
Well, that was exactly what David was always thinking about! He wanted to know how artists made them as well.
But he did the work to find out and wrote Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters. [David explained his findings in the BBC Documentary David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge.]
Because of reproduction! David made color copies from all these art books and pinned up art from hundreds of years of art history on this huge wall in his studio. Then he pinpointed when the glassmakers came along (lenses) and Brunelleschi discovered one-point perspective in 1430. [In Secret Knowledge, David explained how painters such as Caravaggio, Diego Velázquez, Jan van Eyck, Hans Holbein, and Jean-August-Dominique Ingres used optics to help them create their famous paintings.]
An optical scientist, Charles M. Falco, heard of what David was doing and came out to visit him. David was already experimenting with a camera lucida and camera obscura. Falco said, “Well, you know, you don’t really need a lens. Any concave mirror can give you a projected image, and it works like a lens.” In other words, if you have a concave mirror, you can project the image that you want, then trace it. That was a moment that confirmed for David he was right. There is a Wikipedia page about the Hockney-Falco thesis.
Secret Knowledge shook up the art world, and especially art historians. Some art historians weren’t happy about it. They were the “experts,” and they had missed something huge. Others encouraged David to keep going. Many artists agreed that David was onto something.
He’s a fascinating, deep, deep, profound thinker, philosophical, and he feels that art can change lives. I think he’s changed a lot of people’s lives.
Yes. In fact, there’s a paragraph by me in Secret Knowledge. At the time, I was working at a school and used my computer there to do research on the internet. The “secret knowledge” is not really secret. It’s all out there, but no one looked for this information before. The original title of the book was “Lost Knowledge,” but Thames and Hudson, the publisher, thought “Secret Knowledge” was a better title for selling books.
David had a love-hate relationship with photography. He continually thought about an artist’s relationship with the camera, the one-point perspective, and how pictures are made.
In the 20th century, it was common for artists painting a portrait to take a photo and work from that. Same with landscapes and still lifes. Well, that bothered him. One of his most famous paintings is Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), which is of a young man looking at another swimming in a pool. To paint that figure, he took what he called a “joiner.”
[His “joiner” technique evolved such that he would take hundreds of photos of a subject from multiple perspectives, intending to capture the way our eyes actually see the subject.] He took five photographs of Peter Schlesinger looking into that pool.
Then he started playing around with that idea of joiners, and he realized he was discovering something remarkable. He was putting time back into the photograph because you don’t have one split second, you’ve got five. So, for about three or four years, he wasn’t painting. He was creating these photograph experiments, and he was taking them as far as he could. These experiments led to Secret Knowledge.
His art dealers were a bit worried: “David, when are you going to start painting again?” He had doubts sometimes, but David’s doubts passed quickly [Bing laughs]. Eventually he made Pearblossom Highway, which included more than 700 individual photographs.
[In this video, David explained how he made Pearblossom Highway. In this video, David drove Videolog TV show host Huell Howser to the location in San Gabriel, CA, where he took the photos for Pearblossom Highway. One of David’s dachshunds is sitting on his lap, front paws placed on the steering wheel, looking out the front window. It’s worth watching just to see the dog perched on David’s lap as he’s driving, while Huell Howser is nervously encouraging David to place both hands on the steering wheel.]
Then he just stopped, and he returned to painting and opera sets, incorporating the new discoveries he had made. His paintings took a radical turn. He never made a work based on a photograph again. He knows when to just stop.
David always said, “Well, I don’t care if I bore other people. I just don’t want to bore myself.” He always wants a challenge. He likes to try new mediums and was interested in the technological revolutions that began in the early 1980s, such as printing and fax machines.
I have to put everything in the past tense now, which is difficult.
He created work for exhibits in Japan, São Paulo, Brazil, and Salts Mill near his hometown of Bradford, England. He faxed entire shows from his Los Angeles studio. In fact, he sent me some faxes when I worked at Tower Records. I wanted to learn more about David Hockney’s faxed work and found a detailed September 3, 1989, Washington Post story, “The Soul of a New Machine: David Hockney and His Art for The Faxes.” It provided a helpful explanation, plus Bing makes an appearance. Here’s an excerpt from the article:
Some of the faxes are black-and-white prints of paintings that have been reduced by color laser copiers. Other faxes are originals in themselves, drawings meshed with printed textures created from Xerox prints and enlargements of everyday materials such as fabrics and textured book covers.
Hockney regularly faxes drawings to Bing McGilvray, art director at Tower Records in Boston, who used to work for the artist in Los Angeles. “I call it Fine Art X-press,” McGilvray says. “I’ve started using it in my own work here, and it’s applicable to all kinds of artwork. The most interesting thing is they keep getting bigger and bigger. He used to send single pages, but now with the laser copier he can precisely cut up the drawing and send it piece by piece, so you end up with these enormous prints. It means you don’t need a huge space to do a huge picture, and you don’t have to get a trucking company to send something across the country.”
Yes. The first page was a grid that showed you how to put them together, and the faxed pages were numbered.
The earliest faxes were on this really terrible paper, and I had to take them around the corner from Tower Records to copy them onto standard paper at the Copy Cop. David loved the name “Copy Cop” because he realized, you can’t “police” copies. At the time, he said, “This is the difference between the West and Russia.” Because in Russia people had to register any kind of printing machine with the government.
David was on top of the latest technology, and he would use it in ways people hadn’t anticipated. The equipment manufacturers didn’t think someone could transmit an entire art show with a fax machine.
David used office copy machines to make prints. With the first color copier, which David bought right away, the colors were in individual cartridges. Red, blue, yellow, and black were overlaid one at a time, much like making a color lithograph. He realized the copiers were essentially printing machines. He said, “There’s no such thing as a bad printing machine, only bad printers.”
I don’t think they affected him that much. I said to him, “Money changes people, but it’s never changed you.” It was true. The more money he had, the more he could do, the more studio space he could have, the more equipment and the best paints and canvases he could buy. It was never about amassing a fortune.
He’s always said that he’s been very fortunate and privileged because he could get up every morning and do whatever he wanted.
He’s all about work. He’s got the real Yorkshire work ethic. When the iPad came along, he loved it because he could then take a picture of a painting and bring the iPad up to his bedroom and keep working on it. He loved to work. He said to his friend George Lawson, “Inspiration doesn’t visit the lazy.” George replied, “Thank goodness.”
Yes. He was in the studio until maybe a week before he died.
I was in Seattle when I got a job at Peaches Records doing art direction and promotions. Eventually they asked me to move to LA, where they were based. They were trying to compete with Tower Records.
I met all kinds of rock stars who came into the store: Patti Smith, James Brown, Dolly Parton, the Doobie Brothers, Neil Diamond. This was in the late 1970s, when rock and roll was king. When I got to LA, every billboard on Sunset Boulevard featured a rock album. But Peaches went belly up within four months.
The company gave me the choice of a plane ticket back to Seattle or $1,000. I decided to stay in Hollywood and take my chances there. It was hand-to-mouth. Thinking back, I don’t know how I pulled it off, but somehow, I did.
When I realized the only thing I’m good at is going to school [he laughs], somehow, I got myself into UCLA film school [part of the College of Fine Arts at UCLA].
Initially I planned to study animation, but then I realized I didn’t want to sit in a windowless room and draw the same picture over and over again. I wanted to go to the beach. Fortunately, this new thing came along: video. [Bing changed his focus to filmmaking.] My professor was Shirley Clarke, a New York avant-garde filmmaker who made classic movies including The Connection and Portrait of Jason. She was a hoot!
It was very, very, very intense work. I was there 24 hours a day.
By the late 1980s, video cameras went from the ones you mount on your shoulder to hand-held versions. David bought six cameras because he realized I could set them up and record, from different angles, the huge scale model of the opera stage. He built the sets and moved the figures. He had a lighting board to control all the lighting changes with the music.
My job was to get the cameras ready, film the scene we were rehearsing, and then edit the video. Each day, we would review the video from the previous day. We had a fully envisioned version of the entire opera on Hi8 tape before we ever entered the opera house to rehearse.
It’s my middle name. I adopted it as a first name early on. My mother liked Bing Crosby.
I start with my own photo, which I then enter through a process I call “Planet of the Apps,” which involves tricks I’ve learned over the years from using a variety of filter apps. I’ve done it since I got my first iPhone in 2012. But now with AI you just tap in a few words. Not for me.
Yes. Most people there didn’t talk to the guards, but Rebecca Reynolds [Executive Director, Manship Artists Residency] did, and that’s how we met. Word got out that I was friends with David, and the next thing you know, I was having lunch with Barbara Shapiro, one of the curators. That led to a show of huge Hockney landscapes, and David came to the MFA for the opening. He loved to see his shows in museums.
The simple truth is that I was a drug addict. I liked speed, like everybody in the 1960s, including my mother, who was on diet pills. Speed was hideous, but it started out great, like every drug. There’s a reason people do drugs. They make you feel good until they don’t.
Addiction is a horrible thing. I had to escape LA twice because of it. Then I found it in Boston. I ended up going to prison because I got caught in the middle of a drug deal. I was the mule, as they say. I only mention it because it’s a part of this HOCKNEY REPRODUCTION(S) story. David was sending me catalogs when I was locked up, and I was able to follow what he was doing.
I’m not proud of it, but I’m pleased that it’s turned out so well. The reason that it did was because I ended up in a sober house run by Geoff Richon in Gloucester. The minute I stepped into that sober house and out onto the top balcony and saw all of Gloucester Harbor laid out in front of me, I knew I was home.
I’d been to Gloucester before, as a boy, but that’s not what led me to live here. It was one of few options I had being still on probation. I moved into the recovery house on 11/11/2011. Maybe it was 11:11 a.m. when I walked through the door.
I realized I hit the recovery jackpot here and I wouldn’t get another chance like that. I owe a great debt to Geoff Richon because there’s nothing in the recovery world that’s remotely like that place. He doesn’t want any recognition for it, but I’m happy to give him some now. I never dreamed I would end up in such an amazing place as Gloucester.
I made my way to the Cape Ann Museum and started volunteering in the archives. Stephanie Buck [the Museum’s librarian and archivist at the time] gave me 12 boxes of Joe Garland‘s papers to catalog. Joe Garland was an author, a World War II vet, and a historian. He wrote books about Cape Ann, and his most famous book was Lone Voyager, a biography of Howard Blackburn. Joe passed away two years before, so I never met him, but everybody in town knew Joe.
I got a crash course in Gloucester history by reading everything Joe had written. During his whole adult life, he was working on his World War II memoir. He had PTSD, and he was married to this amazing woman, Helen Garland, who worked at the UN in her previous years. They were quite an amazing couple. I became good friends with Helen.
While I was volunteering at the Cape Ann Museum, I was constantly in touch with David. It took me a while to get a passport, but once I did, I frequently traveled with David.
I went to London, where he had a studio. I went to Yorkshire and spent two Christmases there with David’s family. We went to Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Baden-Baden—David loved that place.
Then I’d return to Gloucester, and I’d be asked to take a surprise urine test to see if I was still clean. My life doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it’s been amazing.
I’ve known him so long, it seemed normal, but I also knew it was very special.
Our travel usually involved one of his exhibition openings, and the shows kept getting bigger and bigger. In the past 20 years, there was a substantial retrospective every other year because every museum wants a big Hockney show. The shows were guaranteed to sell out. He has touched millions of lives in tons of different ways. People just love his work.
They love his work because they don’t need a wall plaque to explain what they’re looking at. His art is instantly understandable. It’s accessible. It’s colorful. The colors are visceral. Most people love a big garden full of flowers. That’s what David provides, this bright burst of joyous color.
I think he would. When we talked about his work, we were pretty much on the same wavelength. He argued with me about other things. His approach to politics is Libertarian, “Why don’t they leave me alone?” That’s why he took up the smoking cause.
He was kind of a militant smoker. He hated bans on anything that could provide pleasure to people. “How dare they deny me my pleasure?!” One friend said, “Well, David, you know you still can’t smoke in Westminster Abbey.” [Bing smiles.]
He could laugh at himself as well. He was not pompous, but he knew he was damn good. He knew that from a young age. His sister Margaret once said in an interview “Oh David, he always seemed to know how to get on in life.”
Well, I don’t have paintings worth millions of dollars stashed in my apartment. I have posters that I love. I love our poster for HOCKNEY REPRODUCTION(S).
I like Garrowby Hill. The painting is owned by the MFA. I’ve been down Garrowby Hill in Yorkshire with David.
Red Grooms, who is over-the-top brilliant and very cartoony.
Going to Lawry’s [the iconic Los Angeles prime rib restaurant] with David and friends and to Spago. One night I joined David and Billy Wilder at Spago—that was memorable! [When I pressed Bing on other celebrity encounters, he described meeting Paul McCartney and Jay-Z, as well as Steve Martin, Vincent Price, and Dennis Hopper when they dropped in to David’s studio.]
Here in town, I like Midori, The Lobster, Tonno, and Charlie’s. I love having dinner with friends.
Here’s what I would serve if Bing came to dinner, which he is invited to do:
Mixed green salad with apples, pears, and grapes (to celebrate David Hockney’s Apples, Pears & Grapes
Spago’s quintessential pizza topped with smoked salmon, crème fraîche, and caviar
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