Most artists, good artists, trust their intuition. I trust mine. Sometimes it leads you to make mistakes, but that hardly matters…There is no such thing as failure, you just learn from it and go on. That’s the way I see it.
David Hockney (b. 1937) is one of the most influential and recognisable British artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Trained at Bradford School of Art and the Royal College of Art, he emerged in the early 1960s as a leading figure in British Pop art, drawing on influences ranging from Picasso and Bacon to Abstract Expressionism. After moving to Los Angeles in 1964, the Californian landscape, swimming pools and domestic interiors became defining subjects, characterised by vivid colour and a distinctive exploration of pictorial space. Hockney’s practice has always extended beyond painting to encompass drawing, printmaking, photography, collage, set and costume design, video and digital technologies, including the iPad. His photographic collages and later digital work reflect a continual investigation into how we perceive and construct images. From the 2000s, he returned increasingly to the landscapes of his native Yorkshire and later Normandy, working in watercolour, charcoal, digital drawing, video and large-scale painting. His remarkable career is defined by continual experimentation, an enduring commitment to representation and an ability to embrace new technologies while remaining fundamentally rooted in the possibilities of painting.
