David Hockney
Painter of pools and colour.
David Hockney painted sunlit swimming pools in California and has since used photo collages and the iPad.
David Hockney was born in 1937 in Bradford, Yorkshire, into a working-class family. He studied at Bradford School of Art and then at the Royal College of Art in London, where he was already attracting attention as a student. His early pictures, in a scrawled, playful style, dealt openly with his homosexuality, among other things, which was unusual and brave at a time when homosexuality was illegal in Britain.
In 1964 he moved to Los Angeles. California’s light, palm trees, modern villas and swimming pools became his subjects. He painted in acrylic in bright, flat colours. A Bigger Splash of 1967, with a white splash rising from a pool beside a modernist house, is in the Tate in London. So is the double portrait Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy of 1970–71. Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) of 1972 sold in 2018 for a record price for a living artist.
Hockney has always been interested in how we see and how pictures work. In the 1980s he made large photo collages from hundreds of Polaroids, inspired by Cubism, to show how the eye moves. He has designed sets for opera, and in his 2001 book Secret Knowledge he put forward a controversial theory that the Old Masters used lenses and mirrors to depict reality.
In the 2000s he returned to Yorkshire and painted large-scale landscapes, often outdoors, among them Bigger Trees Near Warter of 2007, a painting made up of fifty canvases, which is in the Tate. He has also drawn on the iPhone and iPad and exhibited prints of the digital images. In 2018 a stained-glass window he designed for Westminster Abbey was unveiled. In recent years he has lived and worked in Normandy.
Hockney is regarded as one of the most popular and most important British artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. He has shown that painting and drawing can be renewed through new technology without losing the joy of looking.