David Hockney

David Hockney was born on 9 July 1937 in Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire, the fourth of five children, and from an early age demonstrated an extraordinary commitment to art. He studied at Bradford College of Art from 1953 to 1958 before earning a place at the Royal College of Art in London, where he studied from 1959 to 1962 alongside peers including Derek Boshier and Pauline Boty. At the RCA he was already producing work of notable confidence and individuality, receiving the gold medal at graduation. His early paintings engaged with the nascent Pop Art movement while retaining a deeply personal, even autobiographical sensibility — works such as We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961) announced an artist unafraid to bring his own identity into his art.

A visit to Los Angeles in 1964 proved transformative. Hockney was electrified by California's light, colour, and culture, and he eventually settled there in 1978. The swimming pool series that emerged from this period — including the iconic A Bigger Splash (1967) and Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972) — combined acrylic's flat, vivid colour with a deceptively simple compositional intelligence. These works made Hockney internationally famous. He continued to reinvent himself: in the early 1980s he created his celebrated photocollages, or "joiners," which explored how the eye actually perceives space over time rather than in a single frozen instant, drawing on the ideas of Cubism. He later returned to Yorkshire to paint vast, exuberant landscapes, most notably Bigger Trees Near Warter (2007), a monumental work assembled from 50 individual canvases.

Hockney has remained creatively restless throughout his career, embracing technology at every stage — from the Quantel Paintbox in the 1980s to the fax machine and ultimately the iPad, on which he produces vivid drawings and paintings that carry the same joyful directness as his earliest work. Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970–71) and his Yorkshire landscapes rank among the best-loved paintings in British art. Widely regarded as one of the most influential British artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Hockney has demonstrated across more than six decades that figurative painting, curiosity, and sheer pleasure in looking remain inexhaustible artistic resources.