Hockney: A Life in Art

Self-portrait in earlier years.

 David Hockney died this week, on 9^th June 2026 a shock to me as he seemed to have always been 
around for most of my life. As I was born on July 28^th, 1934, and he on July 9^th, 1937, that statement does seem to fit with the figures! With him, I never had the picture of an elderly man in my mind; it was always the young open smiling face, adorned with large spectacles and topped by a blond mop of hair. He was the fourth of five children of an accountancy clerk who became a Conscientious Objector during WW2, not a popular public position I would assume, from my early childhood memories of the zeal of the anti-Nazi German sentiment which was part of the air one breathed in ordinary, day to day life then.

Hockney was lucky in that both his parents strongly supported the development of his artistic abilities and subsequent career choices. After Bradford Grammar School, Hockney attended Bradford College of Art followed by the R.C.A., the Royal College of Art in London, where he featured, along with Peter Blake, in an historically notable exhibition, New Contemporaries, which announced the arrival of British Pop Art, a movement with which he became strongly associated. Towards the end of his student years, the RCA refused to allow him to graduate unless he completed an assignment of a drawing of a model from life. [1962] He painted Life Painting for a Diploma in protest and refused to write an essay also required for the final examination, insisting that he should be assessed on his artwork alone. While still a student Hockney had begun to exhibit and the RCA recognized his burgeoning talent and his growing reputation by changing its regulations and awarding him the coveted Diploma without the essay! This enabled him to become an art lecturer, a means to an end, and he taught briefly at Maidstone College of Art, followed by teaching spells in the University of Iowa [1964]; Uni of Colorado, Boulder [1965]; Uni of California, Los Angeles [1966/7] and Uni of California, Berkeley [1967].     

Between Kilham and Langsoft.
Yorkshire.

Hockney had moved to America in 1964, hence his university placements and art, and he became almost intoxicated with the brilliance of the natural light enhancing the bright colours around him, particularly in California. He had always been open to new ideas and to experimentation in his art, and now he moved to painting in acrylics, using vibrant colours, to portray a series of swimming pool paintings. He spent more than the next decade living in a series of homes in Los Angeles, London and Paris, in 1974 beginning a personal relationship with Gregory Evans who moved to live with him in 1976, remaining for many years as a business partner.                                             

Garrowby Hill.  One of his most famous paintings.
 Poster  1998

I do not know of his financial affairs beyond that in 1978 he rented a home in the Hollywood Hills

Self portrait in red braces, in later years

which he later bought, incorporating his studio into the main house. He also owned a large beach house on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu which he sold in 1999 for about $1.5 million. During the 1990s Hockney returned to Yorkshire every few months to visit his mother who died in 1999. Until 1997, his visits were short but in 1999 after her death, persuaded by a friend, he started to portray local surroundings, originally from early memories, some from his boyhood, but in 1998, he completed his important painting from life, of the Yorkshire landmark, Garrowby Hill. The Yorkshire landscape continued to exert a strong influence on David and he returned there for increasingly long periods and by 2003, was painting in oils and watercolour en plein air, finally taking up residence in a converted ‘bed and breakfast’ in Bridlington, only about 75 miles from where his life had begun.  He produced a series of watercolours entitled, Midsummer: East Yorkshire 2003/4 following a period of intense study of the medium and began to create works of art comprising paintings of smaller canvases, between 2 and 50, placed together, Some of these were art on a large scale and he used digital photographic reproductions to study and assess the day’s work.

Chair, pool and cactus. Normandy Print
Pleasingly geometric!

The Arrival of Spring in Normandy. 2020. iPad

In 2019 Hockney created a studio at La Grande Cour, a rustic farmhouse near Beuvron-en-Auge in Normandy where he spent a whole year using a sketchpad and iPad to paint the changing seasons in a series of images which he said were inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry another Normandy export.He had an extraordinary talent; inventive, ever alert to and receptive of emerging pop art. and his versatility meant that he could work  happily in painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, stage design and in later digital media such as iPad and iPhone drawings.

 His childhood was a happy one, apparently oblivious to the smoke-blackened industrial landscape outside his door. He seemed unaffected by nostalgia or snobbery and his art, particularly his early art, simply and unselfconsciously depicts modern life, his life as he observed and lived it. His paintings always give a visual pleasure to the observer as he shares his own joy in light and in the beauty of everyday life, especially including the male figure. Hockney was gay but while he was unusually direct in his treatment of gay desire, making it part of his subject matter, it was remarkable in that, in the early 1960s, homosexuality was still illegal with prison a strong probability for ‘offenders’. Being gay was just part of his truth which he lived and painted and thus he unselfconsciously integrated his identity into his art. Both he and his art were insouciant and joyful, but also, innocent and untroubled. His important artistic legacy lies in his innovative approach to light, space and perception with his readiness to integrate both traditional and modern techniques in his highly individual approach to his art.

Pool with two figures
California.