averilburystedmunds: Hockney: A Life in Art

Yorkshire landscape.

Self-portrait in earlier years.

David Hockney died this week, on 9^th June 2026, a sad 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 bleached hair. He was the fourth of five children of an accountancy clerk who became a Conscientious Objector during WW2, was an anti-smoking campaigner and a natural anarchist. David's lifelong readiness to go his own way, and his mild contempt for authority, surely originated at home! Perhaps too, his ferocious work ethic grew from similar beginnings.

Between Kilham and Langsoft.
Yorkshire Wolds.

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, which he saw as 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].

Tree- and cloud-scape in Normandy.

Hockney had moved to America in 1964, hence his U.S. 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. As to his financial affairs, we can see that he moved, over his life, from modest beginnings to a greater opulence, operating from a position of privilege. By 1962, the year he graduated from the Royal College of Art, he was already a 'face', photographed by Anthony Armstrong-Jones for the Sunday Times colour supplement. He never had to struggle for recognition; requests for exhibitions came in and he quickly found an excellent dealer, John, Kasmin. The public loved his art which was, above all, accessible, and over his life, he experienced public acclaim and continuing financial security.

Garrowby Hill. One of his most famous paintings,
demonstrating his love of experimentation and bright colours.
Poster 1998

In 1978, he rented a home in the Hollywood Hills 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.

Self portrait in red braces, with brush, in later years

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 watercolours 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 became a 90 metre frieze, A Year in Normandie, which he said was inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry, another Normandy export.He had an extraordinary talent; inventive and exuberant, 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. For a time, he developed the habit of sending to a wide circle of friends and admirers, frequent iPad drawings which would pop into their inboxes, unannounced.

His childhood was a happy one; he was apparently oblivious to the smoke-blackened industrial

Hockney in Washington Square in the Seventies.

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, he felt so comfortable in expressing homosexuality in his art, when it 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 Hockney 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.