David Hockney: Britain’s Greatest Living Painter

Britain’s Greatest Living Painter: From Bradford to Beverly Hills (Born 1937)

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Bradford Beginnings

David Hockney was born on July 9, 1937, in Bradford, Yorkshire, the fourth of five children in a working-class family. David Hockney’s father, Kenneth, was an accountant and conscientious objector who became involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; his mother, Laura, was a strict Methodist. David Hockney grew up in modest circumstances, but his parents encouraged his artistic talents.

David Hockney attended Bradford Grammar School, where he was allowed to take art classes in lieu of sports. At sixteen, David Hockney enrolled at Bradford College of Art, then won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London. David Hockney arrived in London in 1959, just as British culture was beginning its transformation into the Swinging Sixties.

At the Royal College, David Hockney quickly established himself as a distinctive presence—bleaching his hair blonde, wearing gold lamé jackets, and openly identifying as gay at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain. David Hockney’s work was included in the landmark “Young Contemporaries” exhibition of 1961, which announced the arrival of British Pop Art alongside Peter Blake and others.

David Hockney graduated from the Royal College with a gold medal in 1962. By then, David Hockney was already selling paintings and attracting critical attention. But London’s grey skies and social constraints didn’t suit David Hockney. Something brighter was calling.

Los Angeles and the Swimming Pools

In 1964, David Hockney made his first trip to Los Angeles and was transformed. David Hockney found a city of sunshine, palm trees, and open sexuality—a paradise after the greyness of post-war Britain. David Hockney was particularly struck by the ubiquity of swimming pools, rare luxuries in England but commonplace in California.

David Hockney began painting the pools, capturing their bright blue water, clean modernist architecture, and languid atmosphere. Working in the newly available acrylic paints, which dried quickly in the California heat, David Hockney developed a distinctive style: flat colors, hard edges, and an almost photographic clarity.

“A Bigger Splash” (1967) is perhaps David Hockney’s most famous painting. The canvas shows a diving board beside a modernist house, the pool’s surface erupting in a frozen splash. No swimmer is visible—only the spray marks the moment of entry. David Hockney spent two weeks painting the splash alone, creating a paradox: a spontaneous instant rendered with painstaking precision.

David Hockney’s pool paintings became icons of California cool—images of a sun-drenched lifestyle that Europeans could only dream about. But they’re also quietly melancholic, depicting empty houses and solitary figures, suggesting loneliness beneath the glamorous surface.

“The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you’re an artist.”

David Hockney

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Double Portraits

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, David Hockney created a series of double portraits depicting friends and acquaintances in their domestic environments. These large-scale paintings combined David Hockney’s interest in portraiture with his talent for capturing interior spaces and the subtle dynamics between people.

“Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy” (1970-71) shows the fashion designer Ossie Clark and textile designer Celia Birtwell in their London flat, with their white cat Percy. The painting captures a moment of domestic tension—Clark standing, Birtwell seated, their relationship already showing the strains that would lead to divorce. David Hockney painted the scene with luminous precision, every detail of the room rendered with loving attention.

“Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” (1972) combines David Hockney’s pool imagery with his portrait work. A man in a pink jacket stands at the pool’s edge, looking down at a swimmer underwater. The painting took David Hockney 18-hour days over two weeks to complete after he abandoned an earlier version. In November 2018, it sold at Christie’s for $90.3 million—at the time, the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by a living artist.

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The Joiners

In the early 1980s, David Hockney became frustrated with the limitations of conventional photography. A single photograph, David Hockney argued, shows only one moment from one viewpoint—unlike human vision, which scans constantly, building a picture from multiple glances over time.

David Hockney’s solution was the “joiner”: composite images assembled from dozens or hundreds of individual photographs, arranged to show a subject from multiple angles and moments. David Hockney began with Polaroids, laying them out in grids, then moved to commercial prints that he arranged in irregular, overlapping patterns.

“My Mother, Bolton Abbey, Yorkshire, Nov. 1982” was an early breakthrough. David Hockney photographed his mother sitting in the Yorkshire countryside, assembling the Polaroids into an image that captured not a single instant but the experience of looking—time and attention made visible.

David Hockney’s joiners influenced his painting, pushing David Hockney toward more fractured perspectives and multiple viewpoints. They also anticipated digital image-making, where photographs could be manipulated and combined in ways that traditional photography couldn’t achieve.

Stage Design and Opera

Throughout his career, David Hockney has designed sets and costumes for opera, ballet, and theater. David Hockney’s first major production was “The Rake’s Progress” at Glyndebourne in 1975, for which David Hockney created sets inspired by Hogarth’s engravings rendered in cross-hatched lines.

David Hockney’s stage designs for the Metropolitan Opera in New York—including productions of Mozart, Puccini, Strauss, and Wagner—brought his vivid colors and dramatic perspectives to millions of opera-goers. David Hockney approached each production as a complete work of art, designing every visual element to serve the music and drama.

The stage work fed back into David Hockney’s painting, encouraging bolder colors and more theatrical compositions. David Hockney has always moved fluidly between media, seeing painting, photography, printmaking, and stage design as different aspects of a single artistic vision.

“I prefer living in color.”

David Hockney

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Return to Yorkshire

In 2004, after decades in Los Angeles, David Hockney began spending extended periods back in Yorkshire, painting the landscapes of his youth. David Hockney was particularly drawn to the Yorkshire Wolds—rolling chalk hills near the East Coast—and to Woldgate, a tree-lined lane that David Hockney painted obsessively through the changing seasons.

David Hockney’s Yorkshire paintings were vast, sometimes spanning multiple canvases. “Bigger Trees Near Warter” (2007), donated to the Tate, was painted on 50 individual canvases that together measured over 40 feet wide. David Hockney captured the trees with an intensity that recalled Van Gogh—every branch and leaf rendered with loving attention.

The Royal Academy’s 2012 exhibition “A Bigger Picture” showcased David Hockney’s Yorkshire landscapes alongside works created on an iPad. The show was a phenomenal success, demonstrating that David Hockney—then 74 years old—remained at the cutting edge of artistic innovation.

iPad and Digital Art

David Hockney has always been fascinated by new technologies. In the 1980s, David Hockney experimented with the Quantel Paintbox, an early computer graphics system. When the iPhone and iPad emerged, David Hockney embraced them immediately, creating hundreds of digital drawings using the Brushes app.

David Hockney’s iPad drawings often depict flowers, landscapes, and sunrises—subjects David Hockney paints from his bed first thing in the morning, then emails to friends around the world. The digital medium suits David Hockney’s restless energy: no waiting for paint to dry, no running out of colors, the ability to work anywhere.

Critics who dismissed digital art as gimmicky have been won over by David Hockney’s iPad work. The drawings possess the same luminosity and formal intelligence as David Hockney’s oil paintings, proving that the medium matters less than the eye and hand that guide it. David Hockney’s digital prints now sell for substantial sums at auction.

Legacy

David Hockney is one of the most significant artists of the past century—a painter who has remained relevant and innovative across seven decades. David Hockney’s influence extends from Pop Art to contemporary digital art, from the swimming pools of California to the hills of Yorkshire.

David Hockney has received Britain’s highest honors: Order of Merit, Companion of Honour, and Royal Academician. The David Hockney Gallery in Bradford showcases his early work, while Salts Mill in nearby Saltaire houses one of the largest permanent collections of David Hockney’s art.

Now in his late eighties, David Hockney continues to paint every day, dividing time between Yorkshire and Normandy. David Hockney remains a passionate advocate for looking—arguing that in an age of screens and distractions, the ability to truly see is more valuable than ever. David Hockney’s life’s work is an extended meditation on vision itself.

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Viewing David Hockney’s Work

David Hockney’s work is held in major collections worldwide. Key venues include Tate Britain (which holds “A Bigger Splash”), the David Hockney Gallery in Bradford, Salts Mill in Saltaire, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

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See David Hockney’s “A Bigger Splash” at Tate Britain or explore his Yorkshire roots in Bradford