David Hockney

David Hockney was one of the most beloved and influential artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries — a Bradford boy who conquered the world simply by painting the things he loved. Born on 9 July 1937 in Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire, the fourth of five children of Kenneth and Laura Hockney, he showed extraordinary artistic talent from an early age. At Bradford Grammar School, where he won a scholarship, he famously wrote in an exam, "I am no good at science but I can draw" — a declaration of identity as much as an answer. His teachers warned that enthusiasm for art alone was not enough to make a career. They were wrong. After training at Bradford College of Art from 1953 to 1957, Hockney enrolled at the Royal College of Art in London in 1959. He became the college's star student, yet remained characteristically defiant: when required to write a dissertation for graduation, he refused, insisting his work should be judged on its artistic merit alone. The resulting stand-off became something of a public scandal, and the Royal College eventually awarded him both his diploma and its prestigious Gold Medal in 1962. He arrived at the ceremony in a gold lamé jacket. The tone was set. In 1961, he emerged as a leading voice of British Pop Art at the Young Contemporaries exhibition, though he never entirely accepted the label. Two years later, a first visit to California changed everything. Hockney fell in love with the Californian light, the open lifestyle, and — above all — the swimming pools. He moved to Los Angeles in 1964 and began the iconic pool paintings that would define his public image: shimmering, sunlit canvases that seemed to transform paint into pure joy. "A Bigger Splash" (1967) and "Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)" (1972) became two of the most recognised images in modern art. In 2018, the latter sold at Christie's for $90 million, the highest price ever achieved by a living artist. Yet Hockney was never content to repeat himself. Over seven decades, he moved freely between painting, printmaking, photography, stage design, photographic collages he called "joiners," and — in his eighties — exuberant iPad drawings that delighted a new generation. He returned repeatedly to his native Yorkshire, painting its lanes and hedgerows with the same loving attention he gave the California hills. He was, as he once put it, "an English Los Angeleno." He passed away peacefully at his London home on 11 June 2026, three weeks before his 89th birthday. His philosophy was as simple as it was profound: "Paint the things you love." He did — and the world is richer for it.