The art world adored David Hockney. A Hockney painting made the everyday shimmer and let you feel the painted sunlight or hear the strokes of a splash. His frames were alive with color, from the impossible blues of swimming pools to the dazzling greens of winding country roads. In between, he painted his beloved dachshunds, cherry blossoms, and portraits of near and dear friends. With his passing on June 11 at the age of 88, the world lost not only one of its greatest artists, but one of its happiest ways of seeing.
While the artists’ paintings were jam-packed with joy, beneath the whimsy was an artist who believed seeing the world was an act of love, observed and documented through the eye, the hand, and the heart.
The eye
Born in Bradford in 1937, a small county in the North of England, Hockney emerged as one of Britain’s most celebrated artists before he found a second home in Los Angeles in 1964. It was while looking out the plane window and seeing the shimmering landscape of pools that he was inspired to produce his iconic works, “A Bigger Splash” and “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures).”
Painting the stark sunlight onto the flat geometry of LA architecture, he once said, “I love California; everything is so artificial,” while also insisting that “anything simple always interests me.”
In an interview with The Guardian on what makes a masterpiece, he shared that “The eye is always moving; if it isn’t moving, you are dead. The perspective alters… In real life, when you are looking at six people, there are a thousand perspectives… A still picture can have movement in it because the eye moves.”
Hockney’s eye was always on the move, and his oeuvre proved that observation itself could become an art form. He famously said, “The world is very beautiful if you look at it. But most people don’t look very much.”
The hand
While Hockney encouraged the world to pay attention, seeing was only the beginning of the process, as his hand transformed observation into deeper understanding.
“Once my hand has drawn something my eye has observed, I know it by heart, and I can draw it again without a model,” he said, without a tinge of arrogance. Throughout his life, he oscillated between mediums, moving through acrylic paint, photography, video installations, and even an iPad balanced in his lap.
“Once my hand has drawn something my eye has observed, I know it by heart, and I can draw it again without a model”
Later in life, he left LA and returned to the European continent, first to Yorkshire, painting forests and country lanes in explosive colors. When he entered his seventies, he embraced digital art without pretension, creating luminous iPad drawings of trees in full bloom from Normandy (fun fact: He painted most of these with his thumb). Ever warm and social, he chose to paint on an iPad so he could send the drawings to his friends on the same day. While other artists might turn their nose up at the medium, Hockney declared, “I’m convinced that technology and art go together—and always have, for centuries.”
The heart
Despite the ground-breaking newness of his art during the many stages in his career, perhaps it’s Hockney’s subject matter that has made him so beloved. When art can often be preoccupied with irony or darkness, with a little bit of stubbornness, Hockney continued to choose delight.
“I have always believed that art should be a deep pleasure… There is always, everywhere, an enormous amount of suffering. But I believe my duty as an artist is to overcome and alleviate the sterility of despair… New ways of seeing mean new ways of feeling… I do believe that painting can change the world.”
“I believe my duty as an artist is to overcome and alleviate the sterility of despair… I do believe that painting can change the world”
Possessing a strong personal ethos, Hockney was also an advocate for the LGBTQIA+ community, being gay himself, and dared to openly depict love and relationships between men at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain.
In his bearing, Hockney never hid either, living with the same unapologetic spirit he painted with. He was known for donning round spectacles, mismatched socks, bleached hair, and bright yellow Crocs, even at royal events. Outspoken as always, he once joked, “Oh, I like smoking, I do. I smoke for my health, my mental health. Tobacco gives you little pauses, a rest from life. I don’t suppose anyone smoking a pipe would have road rage, would they?” And so he did smoke, until the day he died.
For nearly nine decades, Hockney went through life by the creed that art begins with the eye, is shaped by the hand, and is completed by the heart. Looking at the world with endless wells of curiosity, he painted with a manner that refused cynicism, leaving extraordinary joy for the rest of us to see, if only we take the time to look.
