David Hockney
Based on Wikipedia: David Hockney
In November 2018, a painting of a man staring at another man swimming in a pool sold for ninety million dollars. For a few months, until Jeff Koons reclaimed the crown with a stainless steel rabbit, David Hockney held the record for the most expensive artwork by a living artist ever sold at auction. He was eighty-one years old. The painting, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), had taken him just two weeks to complete in 1972, though he'd destroyed an earlier version first.
This is the strange trajectory of Hockney's life: a working-class boy from Bradford, in the industrial north of England, who became synonymous with the sun-drenched swimming pools of Southern California, who revolutionized how we think about photography without ever calling himself a photographer, who painted Yorkshire fields on an iPad, and who, in his eighties, found himself making art during a global pandemic from a farmhouse in Normandy.
Bradford to London
David Hockney was born on July 9, 1937, the fourth of five children. His father Kenneth was an accountant's clerk who later ran his own business—and who had been a conscientious objector during World War II, refusing to fight on moral grounds. His mother Laura was a devout Methodist and strict vegetarian. These weren't wealthy people. They were principled people, and that matters for understanding what came next.
Hockney attended Bradford Grammar School, then Bradford College of Art, where his classmates included several artists who would go on to shape British Pop Art—Derek Boshier, Pauline Boty, Norman Stevens. But it was at the Royal College of Art in London where things got interesting.
The RCA was the most prestigious art school in Britain. Hockney arrived and promptly made trouble.
When the school told him he couldn't graduate without completing a required life drawing assignment—a nude figure drawn from a live model—he painted Life Painting for a Diploma in protest. The painting was his way of saying: judge my art, not my compliance. He also refused to write the required final examination essay. His argument was simple: he was an artist, not a writer, and his work should speak for itself.
The RCA faced a choice. They could enforce their rules on a student they recognized as genuinely talented, whose reputation was already growing beyond the school's walls. Or they could change the rules.
They changed the rules. Hockney got his diploma.
This early defiance reveals something essential about him. Hockney has never been interested in doing things the expected way. He's interested in seeing—in understanding how vision works, how we perceive space and time and other people—and he's been willing to abandon any medium that stops helping him see more clearly.
California Dreaming
In 1964, Hockney moved to Los Angeles. He was twenty-seven years old, gay at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain, and suddenly surrounded by sunshine, swimming pools, and a kind of freedom he'd never experienced.
The swimming pools became his subject. Not because they were glamorous—though they were—but because water interested him technically. How do you paint something transparent? How do you capture light moving through liquid? Hockney worked in acrylics, a relatively new medium at the time, using vibrant colors that seemed to capture the particular quality of California light.
He bounced between Los Angeles, London, and Paris throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. In 1974, he began a decade-long relationship with Gregory Evans, who moved with him to the United States in 1976 and remains his business partner to this day. In 1978, Hockney rented a home in the Hollywood Hills; he later bought it and expanded it to include his studio.
But here's what's remarkable: Hockney never became a "California artist" in any limiting sense. He painted pools, yes. He painted the domestic lives of his friends and lovers. He created Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy, a double portrait of fashion designers Celia Birtwell and Ossie Clark with their cat, which hangs in the Tate Gallery and is one of the most recognized British paintings of the twentieth century. But he was always restless, always looking for new problems to solve.
Portraits as Time
Throughout his career, Hockney has returned obsessively to portraits. The same faces appear again and again: his family, his employees, artists he's worked with, curators, dealers, lovers. He's painted his romantic partners—Peter Schlesinger, Gregory Evans, and others—with a combination of tenderness and unflinching observation.
Most of all, he's painted himself. Over three hundred self-portraits, spanning decades. You can watch Hockney age in his own work, watch his style evolve, watch his relationship with his own face change.
In 2013, he started what he calls his "twenty-hour exposures"—portraits where each subject sits for six to seven hours across three consecutive days. The title is a joke about photography, which captures a person in a fraction of a second. Hockney's point is that a painted portrait captures something different: not a moment, but an accumulation of moments. Not how someone looks, but how they exist over time.
The Royal Academy exhibited eighty-two of these portraits (plus one still life) in 2016. The show traveled to Venice, Bilbao, and Los Angeles. Critics noted something strange: the paintings felt more alive than photographs of the same people would. More present. More true.
The Joiners
In the early 1980s, Hockney began making what he called "joiners"—composite images assembled from dozens or hundreds of individual photographs.
The discovery was accidental. He'd noticed that photographers were using wide-angle lenses, and he hated the results. Wide-angle photographs distort space; they make rooms look bigger than they are, faces look stranger than they are. While working on a painting of a living room in Los Angeles, Hockney took a series of Polaroid shots and glued them together, just to help him see the space better.
When he stepped back and looked at the composite, he realized he'd made something new.
A single photograph captures a room from one viewpoint at one instant. Hockney's joiner captured the room from multiple viewpoints across multiple instants. You could see the couch from here, the window from there, the rug from above. The effect was almost like moving through the space yourself, your eye wandering, your attention shifting.
This is Cubism—the artistic movement pioneered by Picasso and Braque in the early twentieth century, which represented subjects from multiple angles simultaneously. But Hockney arrived at it through photography, a medium that everyone assumed was locked into a single perspective.
He made joiners of landscapes, like Pearblossom Highway #2, where a desert road fragments into dozens of viewpoints that somehow cohere into something more than a photograph. He made joiners of people, like My Mother, Bolton Abbey, 1982. Each piece was an argument about perception: that we don't actually see the world the way a camera does. We see it in fragments, over time, from shifting positions. Our brain assembles reality from incomplete glimpses.
Eventually, Hockney became frustrated with photography's limitations. "Photography seems to be rather good at portraiture," he said, "but it can't tell you about space, which is the essence of landscape." He returned to painting—but the joiners had changed how he painted.
Old Masters and New Technology
Between 1999 and 2001, Hockney became obsessed with a question: how did the Old Masters achieve such astonishing realism? He suspected they'd been using optical aids—lenses and mirrors—much earlier than art historians believed.
To test his theory, he started using a camera lucida, an antique optical device that superimposes the image of a subject onto your drawing surface. You look through the lens and see both your paper and your subject simultaneously, allowing you to trace what you see. Hockney created over two hundred drawings using this device—portraits of friends, family, and himself.
His research culminated in a book, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, which argues that artists like Caravaggio and Vermeer used optical devices to achieve their famous precision. Art historians remain divided on the thesis. But for Hockney, the point was never really about proving what the Old Masters did. It was about understanding what technology makes possible—and what it obscures.
The Digital Leap
In December 1985, Hockney used something called a Quantel Paintbox—an early computer that allowed artists to sketch directly onto a screen. The BBC filmed him using it for a documentary.
This was decades before the iPad. The Paintbox was clunky, expensive, limited. But Hockney saw something in it: a new way to make marks.
The real breakthrough came in 2009, when Hockney, now seventy-two years old, began painting on his iPhone using a free app called Brushes. The phone screen was tiny. The interface was primitive. But Hockney painted hundreds of portraits, still lifes, and landscapes on it, often sending them to friends as digital gifts that would arrive in their inboxes at dawn.
When the iPad came out in 2010, Hockney switched to the larger screen. He visited Yosemite National Park and drew its landscapes on the device. He designed a stained glass window for Westminster Abbey—the Queen's Window, unveiled in 2018, commemorating Elizabeth II—using the iPad.
Critics didn't know what to make of it. Was iPad art "real" art? Did it matter that you could zoom in infinitely, that you could undo mistakes instantly, that the "paint" was just pixels?
Hockney's response was characteristically pragmatic. The tool doesn't matter. The seeing matters. If the iPad helps you see something new, use the iPad.
The Return to Yorkshire
In the 1990s, Hockney began returning to Yorkshire more frequently to visit his aging mother. At first, he rarely stayed more than two weeks. But in 1997, his friend Jonathan Silver, who was terminally ill, encouraged him to paint the local landscape.
Hockney started with paintings based on memory—scenes from his childhood. Then he began painting en plein air, outdoors in front of his subjects, the way the Impressionists had a century earlier. In 1998, he completed Garrowby Hill, a painting of a Yorkshire landmark.
By 2003, he was spending longer and longer periods in Yorkshire, eventually setting up residence and a studio in Bridlington, a seaside town about seventy-five miles from where he was born. He began working on enormous canvases—compositions made of multiple smaller paintings, sometimes as many as fifty, arranged together into single monumental images.
His largest painting, Bigger Trees Near Warter, measures fifteen feet by forty feet. It depicts a coppice—a small group of trees managed for wood—in winter. He painted it on fifty individual canvases, mostly working outside, over five weeks. In 2008, he donated it to the Tate.
"I thought if I'm going to give something to the Tate, I want to give them something really good," he said. "It's going to be here for a while."
Multi-Camera Movies and Photographic Drawings
From 2010 to 2014, Hockney began making what he called multi-camera movies. He would set up anywhere from three to eighteen cameras to record a single scene—the Yorkshire landscape in different seasons, jugglers and dancers, exhibitions of his own work. The result was a kind of moving cubism: the same moment captured from multiple angles simultaneously.
In 2014, he combined hundreds of photographs into what he called "photographic drawings"—composite images of groups of friends, assembled from multiple viewpoints. By 2017, he was using photogrammetric software (a technology that constructs 3D models from 2D photographs) to stitch together thousands of images into massive photomurals.
He was eighty years old and still inventing new techniques.
Stage Design
Hockney has also had a long parallel career as a stage designer. His first production was Ubu Roi at London's Royal Court Theatre in 1966. In 1975, he designed sets for Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera. In 1978, he did The Magic Flute for Glyndebourne.
In 1980, the Metropolitan Opera in New York invited him to design sets and costumes for a triple bill of twentieth-century French works titled Parade. The production included a ballet by Erik Satie and an opera with a libretto by Guillaume Apollinaire. Hockney's designs were characteristically bold: bright colors, flattened perspectives, a deliberate rejection of theatrical realism.
Stage design let him think about space differently than painting did. A stage is a box that viewers look into. The designer controls what they see, but not where they look. Hockney had to consider sightlines, movement, the way light falls on three-dimensional objects. It was another way of asking his central question: how does vision work?
Printmaking and Paper Pulp
Throughout his career, Hockney has been a prolific printmaker. He made his first lithograph, a self-portrait, in 1954, when he was seventeen. At the Royal College of Art, he worked extensively in etchings.
In 1965, the Los Angeles print workshop Gemini G.E.L. invited him to create a series of lithographs. He responded with The Hollywood Collection—a series depicting imaginary artworks that might hang in a Hollywood star's home, each print showing a work of art within a frame. It was a joke about taste and pretension, but executed with serious craft.
In 1973, he began collaborating with Aldo Crommelynck, who had been Picasso's preferred printer. In Crommelynck's Paris workshop, Hockney learned new techniques—sugar lift etching, color separation using wooden frames pressed onto the plate. In 1976-77, he created The Blue Guitar, a suite of twenty etchings inspired by both Picasso and the poet Wallace Stevens. The frontispiece acknowledged the chain of influence: "Etchings by David Hockney Who Was Inspired by Wallace Stevens Who Was Inspired by Pablo Picasso."
In 1978, Hockney spent six weeks with the printer Ken Tyler in New York, experimenting with something called paper pulp painting. Instead of applying pigment to paper, you paint with the paper itself—different colored pulps that bond together as they dry. Each image becomes unique, somewhere between printmaking and painting. In six weeks, Hockney made twenty-nine works: sunflowers, swimming pools, variations on themes he'd return to again and again.
What Hockney Sees
The through-line of Hockney's career is not style—his style has changed radically over six decades. It's not medium—he's worked in oils, acrylics, watercolors, etchings, lithographs, photography, fax machines, computers, iPhones, and iPads. It's not even subject matter, though certain themes recur: water, light, faces, Yorkshire, California.
The through-line is an obsession with vision itself. How do we see? What do our eyes actually do when we look at a landscape, a face, a room? Why does a painting feel different from a photograph? What can we perceive that a camera cannot?
Hockney has spent his entire life trying to answer these questions—not theoretically, but practically, by making things. When photography seemed too limited, he invented joiners. When joiners hit their ceiling, he returned to painting with new eyes. When painting felt stale, he picked up an iPad. When the iPad revealed new possibilities, he used them to design a window for Westminster Abbey.
He's eighty-eight years old now and still working. Still experimenting. Still asking the same questions he asked as a rebellious student at the Royal College of Art, refusing to write the essay they wanted him to write, insisting that his art was the only answer that mattered.
In a world full of artists who find a style and stick with it, Hockney stands out for his willingness to abandon whatever is working in favor of whatever might work better. The pools were working, so he made joiners. The joiners were working, so he went back to Yorkshire. Yorkshire was working, so he picked up an iPhone.
The constant is not the output. The constant is the looking.