David Hockney (1937-2026)

     I am writing this an hour or so since the announcement of the death of the British artist David Hockney, and I must that admit that in that time I have been feeling a bit emotional.  Oh, nothing that heavy - no tears, no wailing nor gnashing of teeth, just a sense of loss and the sense of a door closing upon a world.

     His was a very full life beyond the capabilities of most of us.  Not only an artist, in quiet a range of media, but a printmaker, a designer for the stage, photographer and occasionally a writer. He leaves behind a large corpus of work for the art historians to mull over in the future; some of it is perhaps not as good as other work.  With such a voluminous body of work over so many years it could not be otherwise.

     For me his greatest periods (there were two) were, firstly the Late 60s and early 70s when he first discovered California and his art took off in a new figurative direction and then brought back to London, not only his then boyfriend Peter Schlesinger, but what he had learned under that bright West Coast Sun and applied it to dreary down-at-heel, but funky London.  It was the time of Jack Hazan's film 'A Bigger Splash', and Schlesinger's book 'A Checkered Past'.  A time of large canvases -  'Portrait of An Artist' and 'Mr & Mrs Clark and Percy', and at the other end of the scale of a series of ravishing pencil-crayon portraits of friends and lovers that are quite masterly.

    The second is marked, after a long sojourn in California, by his return to England in the 1990s, to the landscape of the East Riding and particularly the Yorkshire Wolds. It sparked a period of creativity that had lasted until his death; one that saw the most exceptional creativity and growth in him as an artist.  The creation of huge monumental artworks both painting and new media, as well as the most intimate, using an i-pod.  His ability to work on both scales was something, perhaps exceptional, as was his ability to find a subject matter everywhere and in everything, which suggest an almost inexhaustible curiosity.  He was also, I suspect, what one might call, an intellectual artist.  I suppose in this post I might have depicted him as an almost Romantic artist in his response to his environment; he was an artist who was always deeply aware of the history of art and the craft of art.

    A few minutes ago I was sitting drafting this post long-hand, sitting at the kitchen table, on which stands a most Hockney-ish object - a vase of tulips.