David Hockney does not do restaurants. “Even before they banned smoking,” he says, puffing pointedly on a Camel cigarette, “I had stopped going. Once you’re deaf, you’re not too keen on a crowded room – it all sounds like one big bang.”

So we are standing in the dining room of Hockney’s capacious, redbrick seaside house in Bridlington, East Yorkshire. He bought this house, formerly a small hotel, decades ago for his widowed mother. He was then living in Los Angeles; now it is his home.

Seagulls caw outside and noonday light streams in through the curtains, illuminating a copy of one of Hockney’s most celebrated, psychologically gripping portraits, “My Parents” (1977). Vases of tulips on the table echo the strict, upright ones in the picture; these in turn underline the solid, rigid pose of Hockney’s mother Laura, whose image exerts an emotional pull over the room. Opposite her – but as distant as the Antipodes – Hockney’s father, engrossed in reading, is a softer, more mobile presence. At 71, Hockney – with grey hair, piercing blue eyes, wily, warm expression and darting features, instantly likeable – resembles him.

It occurs to me that to dine beneath this double portrait might be intimidating. Laura Hockney’s influence was so powerful that four of her five children fled abroad – to Australia, Africa, California. Yet when she died aged 98 in 1999, Hockney said that until that day he had always known where she was and that he would be able to speak to her.

Was it possible for him to return to live in the UK only after her death? “Probably. I spent 30 Christmases in Brid. As the unmarried son, you can’t not do that. I used to visit every three months, but I always thought when I stayed here, it’s too dark, too cold.”

We are saved from the portrait by a shout inviting us to eat – in the kitchen. John Fitzherbert, Hockney’s partner, produces a steaming, outsize salmon quiche from the oven, plonks a quarter on my plate, and shuffles around bowls of salad – creamy potato and celery in basil and olive oil; beetroot circles; mache leaves with rich Saint Agur. Hockney’s technical assistant, Jonathan Wilkinson, joins us briefly. Shy local boys, helpers about the house or studio, drift by. Freddie, an over-active blond beagle, hopefully approaches each diner in turn.

“When Celia [Birtwell, textile designer and Hockney’s muse since 1968] recently came to stay, she said ‘the thing about this house is there are no rules’,” Hockney says. “It’s a bit self-service, you look after yourself. Some days we have baked beans. I actually like baked beans.” He can cook too, he says, to indulgent laughter about his choucroute. “Most people who paint, cook – it’s about mixing things.”

Hockney now needs neither to cook nor eat out: our exquisite, subtly flavoured meal is of restaurant quality. Fitzherbert, 43, is a professional chef who, after meeting the artist at a lunch party in London 20 years ago, tired of Kensington overnight and wrote to Hockney in Los Angeles asking to join him as his cook.

The couple have been together ever since, with Fitzherbert – friendly, quietly efficient and prone to fits of giggles – choreographing a domestic life that has since 2003 reoriented back across the Atlantic. Fitzherbert has redecorated the house in cosy furnishings and vivid hues – his own room sunflower yellow, deep blue for a small home cinema, red and pink (“butch and femme”, laughs Fitzherbert) for the guestrooms – in a style far removed from the cool minimalist interiors that made Hockney famous.

Nevertheless, Fitzherbert placed copies of Hockney’s most famous works on a first-floor balconied corridor presiding over the house. Here hang “Mr and Mrs Ossie Clark and Percy” (1970), with pregnant Celia towering over her languid husband; and a conversation piece depicting Henry Geldzahler, the dynamic cigar-smoking curator at the Metropolitan Museum who was one of Hockney’s closest friends and supporters.

Hockney still has a studio in Los Angeles, but for the past five years his subject has been the Yorkshire landscape of his childhood. A few minutes away are the Wolds, the rolling hills and broad pastures of agricultural land that Hockney calls “the least changed bit of England that I know”. The artist of Californian paradises is now making this English Arcadia his own, in oils, watercolours and, recently, enormous composites of large-scale canvases joined together, painted outside.

Over bottles of non-alcoholic Budweiser, Hockney explains that he sees them not as revisiting the past but as “a new adventure. I tell them in Hollywood that I’m on location. They understand that.” His colours are Fauvish purples and crimsons, verdant greens and corn-golds. The compositions are as commanding, and precisely observed – yet stylised in their offhand, abstracting modernity – as any Hockney ever made.

A substantial selection of this new work goes on show next week in David Hockney, Just Nature, at Museum Würth, Schwäbisch Hall, in Germany – “a small medieval town, which is a great place to show landscape because when people come out they’ll look at the trees”, he says.

These are very British pastoral landscapes, yet shaped by America’s boldness of scope and scale. “My pictures read very well from a long distance,” Hockney says. “It’s the attitude to space. I’ve always been interested in pictorial space. I’m very thrilled by space, me. I’m a bit claustrophobic – not keen on confined space, which is why I chose to live in Los Angeles not New York. I love the American west. I always thought I would be doing this in LA.”

But the beauty and emptiness, and especially Britain’s changing seasons, allowing the same view to be painted differently through the year, drew him back to the Yorkshire countryside. “Spring is nature’s erection, everything straightens up. Summers and winters are long, there’s time, but the short springs and autumn, when things happen very quickly, are action week.”

He has a loft studio in the house and another round the corner, a huge industrial-size warehouse lit naturally through the roof, which made him “feel 20 years younger when I signed the lease, I started running up the stairs”. But “every room in this house is a work room, I’m painting 24 hours a day, nothing else enters your head. It’s like Van Gogh sleeping in the studio. I go to sleep with a picture above the bed; if it’s too big, I make a reproduction and put that up, and in the morning I know what I’m going to do. I have something to pursue and I’m going to pursue it. It came at a time when it was just right, I have the confidence, I’m sure of my observations, I don’t need people. This is the only place where I could work like this; in London I couldn’t – it’s also about mental freedom, space in your head. When you’re young you’re interested in what other people are doing, but I’m interested in what I’m doing.”

This is consciously late work, his pastoral themes rooted in cycles of growth, decay, regeneration. Is Hockney, like many older artists, increasingly in dialogue with the past? “Rembrandt,” he replies instantly. “For the figural and landscape drawings. There is no generic face in Rembrandt, it’s all individuals.” He describes a Rembrandt drawing of a mother teaching a child to walk that he considers “the greatest drawing ever made”.

I wonder if it is chance that he has focused on a maternal theme. “It’s virtuoso drawing but that’s not what you get when you first see it – it’s the tenderness. After that you realise the virtuosity, but he doesn’t screech it like [John Singer] Sargent does. The most ordinary subjects are dealt with only by the very greatest artists.”

Later, as we take third and fourth helpings of salad, he suddenly declares, “I still love Picasso. ‘Las Meninas’ at the National Gallery’s show – the space in that is astonishing.” The history of images has always fascinated Hockney. “Whoever provides the pictures has social control. For 500 years that was the church. The last commission for an altarpiece was 1839 – an ominous date.”

He means the invention of photography. “Then the power of the image was with the camera. But now [with digital manipulation] the photograph has lost its veracity, and when it loses its veracity, we’re in a new era. Where’s the power going now? It’s going to the masses.” Where does this leave young artists? “I don’t know. I’m not sure where it leaves the old artist.” Damien Hirst, he concedes, has been “a maker of memorable images, but I’m not interested in the school of manufacturism. I’m interested in pictures, how they are made, what they do, how powerful they are. I believe, like Van Gogh, the picture should have immediate impact, to pull you in.”

Fitzherbert clears the dishes, and ashtrays are all that are left on the table. Hockney and Fitzherbert are defiant chain-smokers. “As Henry Geldzahler said, we all get a lifetime. Time is elastic. The view of the medical profession is that time isn’t elastic, you must do this or that. They can’t measure pleasure ... And they’re going to cost non-smokers.” Hockney leans forward conspiratorially. “The Treasury used to get £12bn tax from smokers,” he says. “Now cigarettes are so expensive they’ll be smuggled, so you’ll have to find other ways of raising that tax. Even the FT didn’t point that out. I hate Gordon Brown, actually. In some ways I’ve felt very out of step with the age, it’s so shallow. I’m always the outsider. And I’m a smoker, so I’ll stay the outsider.”

But his art is optimistic: a window on a bright clear world. “Oh, I can be very pessimistic,” he says. “But when Celia’s granddaughters are here you can’t be pessimistic. To them life is marvellous, thrilling, and that’s infectious.” Does he regret not having had children? A pause. “Well, that’s what I’ve missed. You can’t have everything in life. I love Celia’s granddaughters, they turn me on, they’re very dear.”

Though not following young artists closely, he “keeps an eye” on developments, and is also abreast of “cinema, animation – have you noticed that The Simpsons uses line and colour but not chiaroscuro?” His tastes are broad: “There’s not much I don’t like, some I’m indifferent to, but I get a lot of pleasure from all kinds of things.” That generosity and pluralism has determined Hockney’s varied career, while his own virtuosity, I reckon, has driven his experiments with new media and techniques, continually seeking those that offer resistance.

He has drawn recent portraits with computer software, using a Wacom graphic tablet and tablet pen, producing inkjet prints that can be physically reworked by hand; these are the subject of next month’s London show Drawing Inside a Printing Machine. One depicting Celia’s granddaughters Lola, Tilly and Isabella – made while the girls watched a DVD on a baby-white chaise longue – has the snapshot spontaneity of a photograph but the fluid lines, a composition interrogating their relationship, and a nonchalant loveliness, characteristic of Hockney’s best portraits.

Tea is poured, and as Fitzherbert disappears briefly to walk Freddie, Hockney produces his newest tool, an iPhone. With a few deft strokes he draws the outline of a face with his finger, clicks a button to alter the thickness of the line, adds eyebrows, lips. Another button produces the peals of York Minster; then the thing becomes a mouth organ that Hockney pretends to play; next it emits sounds like a razor and he pretends to shave. “It’s better than a Blackberry, which is all about efficiency – for businessmen,” he says. “This has a sense of the absurd – so it’s true to life, for me.”

An assistant has arrived to deliver the latest gadget, a gleaming red motorised beach buggy. Hockney’s eyes are shining. Fitzherbert, who has offered to drive me to the station while Hockney tries out the machine, reappears looking anxious. “Be sensible, be responsible,” he warns as Hockney hugs me goodbye over the metal grille across the bottom of the door that keeps Freddie from escaping into the street. The great artist gives a satiric nod. “Yes, Mother,” he calls back, and then the door to his exotic yet everyday world slams shut and we drive away.

Jackie Wullschlager is the FT’s art critic

David Hockney, ‘Just Nature’, Museum Würth, Schwäbisch Hall, from April 27 to September 27; ‘David Hockney, Drawing In a Printing Machine’, Annely Juda Fine Art, London W1, from May 1 to July 11

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David Hockney’s house
Bridlington, Yorkshire

Salmon quiche
Potato salad
Beetroot salad
Mache salad
Budweiser non-alchoholic beer
Mineral water

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Beside the seaside

Long before coastal resorts became tourist attractions, artists worldwide lived and worked by the sea, attracted by its quality of light and dramatic weather conditions.

Willem van de Velde the Older (1611-93) and Younger (1633-1707): the father was initially a sailor; both made their subject the storms off the Dutch coast. Their marine paintings were so acclaimed that Charles II lured them to England with an annual salary of £100 to work at “taking and making draughts of sea fights”.

Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) was obsessed with painting Mount Fuji seen through seascapes, depicting water in motion. The most famous is “The Great Wave off Kanagawa”, where the foam of the wave rises up like claws. The bold simplified graphic style influenced Van Gogh and Whistler.

Gustav Courbet (1819-77). The great French realist first saw the sea aged 22 at Le Havre, then fell in love with the wild Normandy coast around Etretat. His high-pitched, luminous seascapes, with their layers of paint and reductive quality, changed the course of French painting and anticipated 20th-century abstraction. Of Courbet’s “Stormy Sea” at the Louvre, surrealist Joan Miró said: “One feels physically drawn to it, as by an undertow. It is fatal. Even if this painting had been behind our backs, we would have felt it.”

Winslow Homer (1836-1910). Known as the Robinson Crusoe of American art, Homer abandoned a career as a painter of American life and landscape to become a recluse. He lived first in a lighthouse, then in remote Cullercoats, Northumberland, and finally at Prout’s Neck, Maine, in a carriage house 75ft from the ocean. His turbulent, rocky Maine seascapes are his greatest achievement.

Henri Matisse (1869-1954). Born in grey French Flanders, Matisse went in search of light and a new style of painting. By 1905, this had taken him to the small Mediterranean fishing village of Collioure, near the Spanish border. He was joined by André Derain and together they created paintings – views from their window, boats floating on the waves – in pink, vermilion and turquoise, which liberated colour from realism and revolutionised modern art. The Collioure artists were mocked as “fauves” – wild beasts. In the 1950s, Matisse, Picasso, Chagall and other masters settled on the Côte d’Azur.

The St Ives School (1939-60s). At the start of the second world war, Ben Nicholson and his wife, sculptor Barbara Hepworth, moved to west Cornwall to establish an avant-garde art colony that came to include most leading names in mid-century British abstraction: Peter Lanyon, Roger Hilton, Patrick Heron. Nicholson and Hepworth later separated; he left St Ives in 1958; she was killed in a fire in her studio there in 1975.