Born in Bradford in Yorkshire in 1937, David Hockney was brought up in austerity the fourth of five children. As a teenager, he adored the movies just at a time when the colours of Hollywood were exploding onto the screen. Hockney loved to draw, and he became so good at it that he was accepted into London’s prestigious Royal College of Art. While on the world stage American artists such as Jackson Pollock were going wild with abstract works, Hockney painted people he knew, abstracting them in interesting ways.
LET THERE BE LIGHT
Hockney first visited California in 1963, and for the Yorkshireman the experience was euphoric. He said he suddenly understood Van Gogh as they were both “from a dark place, and … had to go somewhere else to see the colour.” He subsequently lived on and off in LA where he painted swimming pools, sunbathers and other scenes of American leisure. He changed from oil to acrylic paint that dries very fast, and created compositions that seem flat and graphic. He used Pop Art colours in radical combinations; for instance, one of his most famous works A Bigger Splash (1967) features a bright blue pool, a banana-yellow diving board and a marshmallow-pink house.
OPTICAL MAGIC
Over his lifetime, Hockney has produced work in an incredible variety of styles. In the 1980s, he made photo collages with photographs taken from different perspectives and at different times in a style that evoked cubism. He designed sets for the theatre and opera. He spent much time in Yorkshire painting the landscape he grew up in. He wrote books challenging perceptions of art history; in his 2001 book Secret Knowledge he argues that advances in realism could only have been made with the clandestine use of mirrors, camera obscuras and other optical tricks.
NOW ON THE IPAD
In the last decade Hockney has embraced new technology, exploring film and digital photography and painting hundreds of portraits, still lifes and landscapes on his iPad, on which he also designed a 20-feet-high stained-glass window for Westminster Abbey. A new show in the National Portrait Gallery in London pays homage to Hockney’s lifelong love of drawing. It features self-portraits he did as a teenager in Bradford as well as new work.
BEAUTIFUL BOYS
David Hockney painted many portraits of friends and relatives in a realistic yet unique style. One of his lifelong interests was gay love, and he produced paintings on the theme well before homosexuality was decriminalised in England in 1967. A 1972 work, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) of his lover and muse Peter Schlesinger sold in 2018 for $90 million, the most expensive work by a living artist sold at auction at the time.
