David Hockney

As an artist David Hockey is easy to get wrong. For years viewers have responded to the extrovert hedonism of his California pictures, the swimming pools, the sensual lifestyle, the uninhibited colours, the recognisable images. Hockney too has always been recognised as a wonderful draftsman. At a time when some art schools no longer thought that drawing was part of an artist’s necessary repertory of skills. And no-one could ever doubt Hockney’s fluency, prolific nature or his versatility…

English painter, printmaker, photographer and stage designer. Perhaps the most popular and versatile British artist of the 20th century, Hockney made apparent his facility as a draughtsman while studying at Bradford School of Art between 1953 and 1957, producing portraits and observations of his surroundings under the influence of the Euston Road School and of Stanley Spencer…

Website dedicated to the artist (French)

Works in the collection of National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Hockney photographed the Grand Canyon in 1982. He commented later that he wanted ‘to photograph the unphotographable. Which is to say, space … [T]here is no question … that the thrill of standing on that rim of the Grand Canyon is spatial. It is the biggest space you can look out over that has an edge…’