David Hockney: from sun seeker to beacon of modern art

As a child growing up in gloomy northern England, David Hockney noticed the sharply defined shadows in the Hollywood films of comedy duo Laurel and Hardy.

“Strong shadows meant a lot of sun,” the painter recalled to BBC television in 2009.

“So I thought, well, wherever that is, it’s always sunny.”

Two decades later, Hockney ‌moved to Los Angeles to immerse himself in that dazzling light.

The artist, whose brightly coloured renditions of California would go on to make him one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, died at age 88 on Thursday, ‌according to his publicist.

No cause of death was given.

Initially, almost as much as his paintings, Hockney was known for his own image (thick-rimmed spectacles, peroxide hair, shiny gold jacket) which became a symbol of ‌Britain’s Swinging Sixties.

As an art student in the northern English city of Bradford – where he was born to an accountancy clerk father and a devout Methodist mother – Hockney rebelled against convention.

He gave titles to his abstract paintings such as Going to Be a Queen for Tonight and Doll Boy at a time when homosexuality was punishable by prison.

To continue his studies, in 1959 he moved to London where he had a meteoric rise in the British pop art movement and rubbed shoulders with stars from dancer Rudolf Nureyev to Mick Jagger.

But Hockney yearned for the excitement he saw in the work of American artists, and using money from the sale of his art, he visited New York for the first time in ‌1961 – where he became a friend ‌of Andy Warhol – and moved to ⁠California three years later.

“I thought people who produced such work must live in colour, so I went in search of it,” he is quoted as ​saying in a biography written by art critic and friend Peter Adam.

“I had spent the first 20 years of my life in the gothic gloom of the north. Here I felt free.”

His pictures of swimming pools and naked men in showers became icons of a sun-drenched lifestyle that he documented with luminous acrylic paint before dividing his time between Los Angeles, London and Paris in the late 1960s and 1970s.

He remained unpretentious despite his success.

“I am actually still a student,” he told Adam.

“I just happen to have quite a lot of credit cards in my pocket.”

In 1985, when he was invited to the White House to dine with President Ronald Reagan, Prince Charles and Princess Diana, he was held up for ⁠half an hour by security officers because he was the only guest to arrive on foot, his biographer wrote.

Hockney’s images of love, ​sex and material wealth led to claims by some art critics that his work was trivial, but he won greater renown than any other British artist of the 20th century.

One of his most famous paintings, Portrait of an Artist (Pool ​with Two Figures) – ‌showing a figure swimming underwater and a man gazing into the pool – sold for $US90.3 million ($A128 million) in 2018, the most expensive work by a living artist sold at auction at the time.

In 2020 another pool painting, The Splash, from 1966, sold for Stg23.1 million ($A44 million).

As he grew older and his life ​turned more domestic, dogs replaced men in Hockney’s work, at a time when many of his friends were dying of AIDS.

He said he cried for two days when Stanley, one of his beloved dachshunds, died in 2001, having been immortalised in scores of paintings and sketches.

In the late 1990s, Hockney began returning more frequently to visit his mother in the northern English county of Yorkshire, where he had grown up, and a ​terminally ​ill friend encouraged him to paint the local landscapes.

Feeling increasingly lonely, he moved from California to ​the seaside town of Bridlington on England’s North Sea coast.

For a decade he painted clumps of bare trees ‌in winter, fields full of ripe crops and tracks stretching towards the gentle rolling hills of the Yorkshire Wolds region.

It was the most productive period of his entire career as he rushed to capture scenes that, he said, changed more dramatically with the seasons than did those of California.

“You don’t retire doing this,” he told the BBC in his broad Yorkshire accent when asked about his unflagging energy, saying “you just do it until you fall over”.

The former enfant terrible of British art, a cigarette almost always in his hand, never stopped trying new techniques.

He used faxes to share his work and then iPads to produce it, and his Yorkshire paintings led to a stained-glass window for Westminster Abbey, in central London.

In 2018, Hockney bought a farmhouse in Normandy, in northern France, and, ​with the help of his long-time partner and assistant, Jean-Pierre Goncalves de Lima, turned his eye to the fields and flowers of his garden there.

The 90-metre-long A Year in Normandie frieze was inspired by the nearly 1000-year-old Bayeux Tapestry.

Hockney’s work ​ethic – instilled in him from getting up daily at six o’clock ⁠to work in hospitals for two years, when he refused to do his military service in the army – barely relented in his later years.

“I tend to ​think that you should work every day,” he said. “And I do.”