“What made Hockney unique was his refusal to treat technology as painting’s enemy.”
One day, the penny dropped: David Hockney was essentially Britain’s Picasso. Not because their work looked alike, but because both possessed restless curiosity, a recognisable vision and confidence to reinvent how we see.
Born in Bradford in 1937, Hockney – who passed away in June – emerged from the Royal College of Art in the 1960s. He moved through portraits, printmaking, stage design, swimming pools, domestic scenes and sunlit Los Angeles, before returning to the Yorkshire landscape. His colour could be vivid and trippy. At times it reminded me of Gauguin: nature intensified rather than copied, made emotionally brighter than reality.
What made Hockney unique was his refusal to treat technology as painting’s enemy. He drew on iPhones and iPads, enjoying their speed and luminous colour, emailing daily sunrises to his friends. He mounted multiple cameras to a vehicle and recorded Yorkshire journeys across grids of screens, creating landscapes that felt as though you could walk through them.
Yet his relationship with photography was complicated. A conventional photograph fixes one viewpoint and one fraction of a second; Hockney felt this did not represent what we see. His photographic ‘joiners’ and paintings bended perspective. Objects can slip from view or curve away at almost fish-eye tangents, yet this distortion feels more truthful than a mechanically perfect image. Something that hadn’t occurred to me until recently.
I was fascinated by the volume of preparatory drawings, studies and repeated versions behind a finished work. Seeing that process revealed not indecision, but sustained looking: every sketch another attempt to understand the subject.
Experiencing Hockney’s work at the 1853 Gallery in Salts Mill, Saltaire, near his Bradford birthplace, brought everything home. On his Yorkshire ground, surrounded by works displayed with pride, I understood his scale, invention and love of nature.
After the passing of the likes of Lou Reed and David Lynch, Hockney is sadly added to the list of people I would have loved to have had a cuppa with.