Never worry what the neighbours think, said papa Hockney

Waiting and waiting to order, David got terribly bored and began to draw all of us on his pink serviette on the table in front of him.

It attracted the waiter's attention, so we were able to place our order. The owner asked if he could keep the napkin but David refused, taking it home and printing us copies instead.

His fame has touched all his family in varying degrees. When David had an exhibition opening in Paris, showing work he had contributed to French Vogue, my mother became guest of honour.

"We visited the gallery and David was presented with a copy of Vogue in a leather case... To celebrate my 85th birthday, next morning I was measured for a suit at Coco Chanel," Mum wrote in her diary.

She wore the suit when she accompanied David to Buckingham Palace to receive his Companion of Honour from the Queen.

Visits to meet the famous kept her alive, with something to look forward to. The actor Vincent Price, an avid art collector, was among those who came to Bradford and had tea with her. And in Los Angeles, where David has long had a home, she met stars including Michael Caine, who asked her how she liked Hollywood. Her answer was: "Nobody seems to hang their washing out, Michael."

My parents would once only have dreamed of meeting such people and visiting such places, and it seems a pity that Dad, who died in 1977, wasn't there to share it all too, especially as his philosophy of life did so much to inspire David.

Born in Bradford in 1904, Dad grew up in a family open to life as it came. By the time they finally married in 1903 they already had three children and Dad, who arrived the following year, was the first to be born in wedlock.

Dad loved Laurel and Hardy and Charlie Chaplin and liked wearing a clip-on bow tie to which he affixed brightly coloured stationery dots to add colour to his world.

"Never worry what the neighbours think," was his favourite advice and David took it to heart.

As an art student in the 1950s he was oblivious to the comments made when, wearing a bowler hat, long red scarf and duffle coat, and spats over his shoes, he transported his canvases and easels around our neighbourhood in an old pram.

Proclaiming his homosexuality in 1962, long before the word gay was used in that context, David isn't afraid to stand up for what he thinks is right, as our father did before him.

As a young man, Dad was persuaded by a friend to attend a talk given by an evangelist preacher. He accepted Jesus that day, and met my mother when he began helping out with her Sunday School classes.

After marrying in 1929, they set up home at the top of a steep hill that was murder to climb while pushing a pram, as my mother soon was, with five children: Paul in 1931, Philip in 1933, Margaret in 1935, David in 1937 and me in 1939.

Dad had been bright enough to go on to further education but, with his older brother Willie away fighting in World War One, creating a void in the family budget, Grandma Hockney had insisted he leave school.

His quick mind for figures and handwriting skills soon won him a job as accounts clerk at a large grocery store, sitting on a high stool in a Dickensian one-man office, huddled over a sloping desk and scribing daily figures.

We always thought him so important having an office to himself, but his talents were best put to use in outside work.

Long before high-viz jackets were commonly worn, he made armbands out of orange fluorescent material so he could be seen at night when crossing the road. He was often laughed at but never worried what people thought.

He corresponded with world leaders on humanitarian matters. In a letter to the Pope, Dad asked him to sell the solid-gold telephone on his bedside table and give the money to the poor of Mexico. And he fought so long and hard against capital punishment that in 1965 he was invited to Parliament to see the act to abolish hanging go through in person.

In our youth, I had no perception that David was to become one of the greatest artists of the 21st century. To satisfy his need to draw during wartime, with paper unaffordable, he woke first, quietly creeping downstairs and drawing on the white edge of Dad's newspaper, Mum's magazine or whatever else arrived that day.

He carried a pencil in his pocket when we went to chapel and used the blank pages at the back and front of hymn books to draw on.

He won a scholarship to Bradford Grammar School in 1948, but art, being regarded as purely recreational, was restricted to one-and-a-half hours a week.

Promising students were forced to drop it altogether, so David deliberately failed academic subjects, once refusing to hand in an essay as his English homework and vowing not to waste time on sports.

Only in his final year at school did David begin intense study of English, History and other subjects. This stood him in good stead for his transfer to Bradford College of Art.

David was soon regarded as someone to watch, his first one-man exhibition in 1963.

On a visit to America the following year, he bought a second-hand Ford Falcon convertible in New York and drove to California. He loved the sunshine and balmy days. With light that made colours vibrate, California was the opposite of Bradford's overcast gloom and an ecstatic David had soon bought a house there.

The first time I visited him there, he took our mother and me to Christmas lunch at the home of director John Schlesinger. On a subsequent visit, singer Tony Bennett and his daughter Antonia joined us for Christmas Day.

The 1990s found him spending increasing amounts of time in the seaside town of Bridlington, Yorkshire, where our mother had moved to live with our sister Margaret.

Margaret had a large house across from the promenade and David would drive from London to visit them. After Mum's death in 1999 he moved into Margaret's house and she moved to a small bungalow near by.

In December 2012 I rang from my home in Leura to wish him Happy Christmas and realised I couldn't make out what he was saying. I knew he wasn't drunk so I emailed Margaret to ask if he was well. She told me he'd had a stroke in November and she wasn't to tell anyone.

I flew back to see for myself. By the time I arrived, David had begun drawing again. It was a blessing. He has always said that life will be finished for him if he cannot use his hands, and he'll no doubt be drawing and painting until his final day.