Remembering David Hockney: A Life of Looking
Throughout his life, artist David Hockney made the act of looking an act of joy. Across seven decades, simple spaces such as a swimming pool, a hedge, or a friend’s living room could become, in his hands, a small revelation about how human eyes actually work. He died earlier this month at the age of 88 in his home in London. Everyone from a king to a prime minister to fellow artists who adored him paid tribute and confirmed there was no one quite like him, and there will not be again.
His Early Years
Born in 1937 in Bradford, England, Hockney trained first at his local art school before arriving at London’s Royal College of Art in 1959. He found himself, almost immediately, at the center of something new. Alongside Peter Blake, he featured in the Young Contemporaries exhibition that announced the arrival of British Pop Art. Yet, Hockney’s early canvases carried an expressionist undertow closer to Francis Bacon than to Warhol’s cool detachment. When the Royal College threatened to withhold his diploma over an unfinished assignment, Hockney simply painted a canvas titled Life Painting for a Diploma in protest. The college relented. It was an early lesson in just how little interest he had in doing things the expected way.
The Light of California
Everything changed in 1964 when Hockney first crossed the Atlantic and settled in Los Angeles. The city seduced him with the impossible blue of the swimming pools, the flat geometry of the stucco houses, the particular quality of sunlight falling on water. Working in acrylic, a medium still new to fine art at the time, he began the series that would define him in the popular imagination. A Bigger Splash and Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) turned the suburban swimming pool into something as worthy of serious painting. The latter would go on, in 2018, to sell for $90.3 million at Christie’s, a record for any living artist at the time. He had originally sold the canvas in 1972 for $20,000.
A Restless, Curious Eye
What set Hockney apart from so many of his contemporaries was his refusal to settle into a signature style and simply repeat it. He moved through stage design for Glyndebourne and the Metropolitan Opera, through the invention of photographic “joiners” assembled from hundreds of Polaroids, through a deep, scholarly investigation into how the Old Masters might have used optical devices, published as Secret Knowledge in 2001. He picked up a fax machine, a Quantel Paintbox, an iPhone, an iPad, each one simply another pencil. “I draw, I do”, he liked to say, and the body of work he leaves behind, more than eight thousand pieces held by the David Hockney Foundation alone, reads like a continuous conversation he was having with the world for sixty years.
The Return to Yorkshire
In later life, Hockney returned again and again to the landscape of his childhood. The rolling fields and tree tunnels of East Yorkshire became, in his seventies, the subject of some of his most monumental works. Bigger Trees Near Warter, a single image stretched across fifty canvases, hung in the Royal Academy’s largest gallery in 2007 before he gave it to the Tate. He painted the same hedgerow in every season, the same hill in shifting light, with the patience of a man who had finally stopped chasing the world’s attention and started simply paying attention. A long stretch in Normandy during the pandemic produced an extraordinary ninety meter iPad frieze recording an entire year’s turning seasons, proof that even in isolation, his curiosity never once slowed down.
A Legacy Already Secure
Hockney’s retrospectives, at the Tate Britain in 2017, at the Centre Pompidou, at the Metropolitan Museum, at the Fondation Louis Vuitton just last year, drew crowds in the hundreds of thousands and confirmed what critics had argued for decades. Hockney was Britain’s most significant living painter, full stop. Tate has already announced two exhibitions for 2027 to mark what would have been his ninetieth birthday, a measure of how little his death will diminish the public’s appetite for his work. He always resisted the idea that any single painting should be his last word. Better, surely, to think of his whole career as an unfinished sentence about how good it feels simply to see.
For an artist who spent a lifetime insisting that there is no such thing as failure, only learning, Hockney leaves behind something rarer than a body of work. He leaves behind a way of looking, one that found beauty in a splash of chlorinated water, in a Yorkshire hedge in May, in the particular slant of light through a studio window. “Love life”, he liked to say, and for sixty years, on every surface he could find, he showed us exactly how.