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1937 — Present

David
Hockney

Painter of light, water & the eye's delight.

From Bradford to Beverly Hills — one of the most celebrated and beloved artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Bradford, Yorkshire

A Northern
Prodigy

Born July 9, 1937, in Bradford, Yorkshire, the fourth of five children. He decided to be an artist at eleven. His parents were supportive; the Bradford Grammar School was less so.

Won a scholarship to Bradford College of Art at 16, then to the Royal College of Art in London in 1959 — where everything changed.

David Hockney

London, 1959–62

The Royal
College of Art

At the RCA he found his tribe — R.B. Kitaj, Peter Blake, Derek Boshier. He won the gold medal on graduation. By 22 he had already exhibited, sold work, and been profiled. He arrived as a student and left as a star.

1964 — The Move West

California
Called.

He landed in Los Angeles in 1964 with $100 and an open mind. The light was unlike anything in Yorkshire. The pools were everywhere. He had found his subject.

"It was paradise — sun, swimming pools, and Technicolor."

The Iconic Series, 1966–71

The
Swimming
Pools

A Bigger Splash (1967) remains one of the most recognizable paintings of the 20th century. A frozen instant — the diver gone, the water erupting — calm architecture against pure Californian chaos.

Hockney spent two weeks on the still background and two days on the splash. The contrast was entirely deliberate.

A Bigger Splash by David Hockney
Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy

1970–71 — Tate Britain

Mr and Mrs Clark
and Percy

A double portrait of fashion designer Ossie Clark and textile artist Celia Birtwell with their white cat Percy. It took two years to paint. The interplay of gazes — Percy stares out, Ossie looks away, Celia confronts the viewer — makes it endlessly unsettling.

Consistently voted the UK's favourite painting.

The 1980s — A Crisis of Seeing

Cubism,
Joiners &
The Camera.

Obsessed by the limits of the single photographic perspective, Hockney began his "joiners" — composite photo collages that show a subject from multiple viewpoints simultaneously, directly channelling Cubism's multiple-perspective idea.

He wrote Secret Knowledge (2001), arguing that Old Masters had secretly used optical devices — lenses and mirrors — to achieve their precision. It was controversial and thrilling.

2005–2013 — Going Home

The Bigger
Picture.

He returned to his native Yorkshire and painted the landscape on a monumental scale — vast canvases of East Yorkshire woods, seasons, and roads. Bigger Trees Near Warter (2007), at 15 feet tall and 40 feet wide, was donated to the Tate.

"The landscape here is as beautiful as Tuscany."

The Digital Turn

He Embraced
the iPad.

From around 2009, Hockney began drawing on his iPhone and then iPad with his thumb, sending the finished drawings directly to friends by email each morning. "I've made hundreds of them," he said. "All sent at dawn."

Major exhibitions of iPad works followed worldwide. A new tool — same Hockney eye.

  • Flowers, sunrises, Yorkshire lanes
  • Exhibited at the Royal Academy (2012)
  • "It's the most exciting medium I've encountered in a long time"
  • Used same compositional instincts as oil on canvas

Recognition

The Honours
Kept Coming.

  • Refused a knighthood twice — accepted the Order of Merit (2012), rarer and more prestigious
  • His portrait Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972) sold for $90.3 million at Christie's in 2018 — a record for a living artist at the time
  • Retrospectives at the Tate, the Met, the Pompidou, and the Guggenheim Bilbao
1937
Born, Bradford
$90M
Auction record, 2018
60+
Years of practice

In his own words

“All you can do is paint what you see. I mean that very literally. You can only paint what you see, and I see differently.”

— David Hockney

Legacy

He never stopped
looking.

From Bradford to Beverly Hills to Bridlington to Normandy, Hockney's life's work is an act of sustained, joyful attention — to light, colour, water, faces, and the endlessly surprising way the eye moves through the world. At 87, he is still painting.

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