Remembering David Hockney, in his own words

Born in 1937 in working-class Bradford, West Yorkshire, David Hockney soon became one of the UK’s most beloved and prolific artists. From his famous depiction of a sun-soaked pool in Los Angeles in A Bigger Splash (1967) to the large-scale landscape of the Yorkshire countryside painted in a vibrant Fauvist colour palette in Winter Timber (2009), his work has always embraced sensuality and the beauty of the so-called ordinary. 

While in later years he acquired the comfortable status of a national treasure, he came of age in an era when his desires were illegal. Before the Sexual Offences Act partially decriminalised homosexuality in England and Wales in 1967 (for men over 21, “in private”), Hockney was presenting paintings such as We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961), a couple locked in a fiercely romantic embrace, and Domestic Scene (1963), which showed one man in the shower while another washes his back. Such tender expressions of queer love were not just shocking; they were widely still considered deviant.

His enthusiasm for life and its many pleasures comes through clearly in the opening pages of A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney, by Martin Gayford. The author recounts a text he received from Hockney in 2009, accompanying an iPhone painting of the sunrise over the North Sea he created that very morning: “Would Turner have slept through such terrific drama? Absolutely not! Anyone in my business who slept through that would be a fool. I don’t keep office hours.” In the spirit of not keeping office hours, the artist spent seven decades tirelessly painting, drawing, photographing, printing, and experimenting with different mediums, constantly fuelling his curiosity and challenging people to look at the world differently.  

Hockney passed away last week on 11 June 2026 at the age of 88, just one month short of his 89th birthday. Below, we remember his art, his indispensable legacy and his pursuit of a “big, brilliant life” in his own words. 

“An artist can approve of hedonism, but he can’t be a hedonist himself” – David Hockney, The Guardian, 2015

For many, Hockney became associated with the fantasy and laid-back bohemia of Southern California in the 1970s: bleached hair, chain-smoking, sunshine, moving among the upper echelons of counter-cultural circles, and an abundance of swimming pools. However, in a 2015 interview with The Guardian, he stressed that while leisure is one of his interests, he maintains a near-obsessive discipline in his work. “I was never much of a party boy. I didn’t mind being seen that way, but I am actually a worker,” he shared with the journalist Simon Hattenstone. “An artist can approve of hedonism, but he can’t be a hedonist himself.”

This attitude could be traced back to his working-class upbringing in Yorkshire, where his father, a committed pacifist, instilled strong political convictions in his son. An anecdote he recalled from when he was 16 reinforces this notion. Announcing he was going off to art school, a neighbour referred to art students as “lazy buggers”, to which he replied, “Oh, I am going to work, don’t worry.” 

This sense of hard work, which followed him through his time at Bradford College and then London’s Royal College of Art was fortunately not driven by institutional markers of success (he continued experimenting, even after retrospectives at major institutions such as Tate Britain and after breaking auction records for a living artist’s work in 2018), resulted in an artistic practice that constantly intrigued both critics and the public. 

“There were no paintings of Los Angeles. People then didn’t even know what it looked like” – David Hockney, The Listener, 1975

In the book David Hockney by David Hockney, the artist shared that he was drawn to the “sleazy, sexy hot nightlife” described in John Rechy’s 1963 novel City of Light, prompting a move to Los Angeles in 1964 without having ever visited the city. As homosexuality was still criminalised in Britain, Los Angeles was, in comparison, a haven with sunlight, boys, American excess and where he felt completely free. The artist embraced the city immediately, painting erotic works such as the Man in Shower in Beverly Hills (1964), Sunbather (1966) and Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool (1966), which are still praised for their courageous depiction of queer desire, specifically within the realm of domestic life. 

These paintings, with their electric-blue swimming pools, sunbathers, and expanses of colour, are synonymous with his work and, as curator Stephanie Barron told the New York Times, are “embedded in the psyche as symbols of Los Angeles”. In an interview with The Listener magazine in 1975, Hockney told Melyn Bragg that, “There were no paintings of Los Angeles. People then didn’t even know what it looked like.” Within days of arriving, Hockney remembered seeing a freeway ramp soaring into the air and thinking, “My God, this place needs its Piranesi.” Over the following decade, as Barron noted, he gave the city a visual language, and works such as A Bigger Splash, the vibrant acrylic painting Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio (1980), and lithograph prints of swimming pools became tied to his biography as an artist. 

“I smoke because it’s part of the work” – David Hockney, Channel 4, 2015

Most of his interviews, photographs and public appearances feature the artist eccentrically dressed, with his signature blonde hair, his distinct glasses and, perhaps even more recognisable, a cigarette between his lips. It was his lifetime joy and one that he insisted helped him become a better artist. In an interview in 2015 with Channel 4, he said, “I smoke because it’s part of the work. When I’m painting, I don’t smoke because my hands are doing it. But when I stop to think about it, I’d always smoke then.” Elaborating further, he explained how the pleasure of smoking helped him in that moment to focus on the picture rather than his ageing body. 

He was passionate about the liberty to smoke, and his habit was commemorated in self-portraits, including his final painting, Play within a Play within a Play and Me with a Cigarette (2025). He was so famous as a smoker that a satirical news outlet published a story about Hockney’s passing with the title “Ashtrays are at half-mast as the art world mourns the passing of one of its finest and most innovative smokers.” It is a headline one could assume he would be enthused about, given that he allegedly stored 2000 cigarettes in his Los Angeles house in case of an earthquake and campaigned against the banning of smoking in public places at the 2005 Labour Party Conference with a placard that read “Death awaits you all even if you do smoke”.

“Art is about correspondences – making connections with the world and to each other” – David Hockney, The New Yorker, 1984

As he considered the future of figurative painting and the 20th century’s interest in abstraction and cubism, he firmly stated that art should not become detached from daily life and insisted on painting as a fundamentally human act. In a 1984 interview with The New Yorker, he explained how the urge to depict and see depictions is a human impulse, “a 10,000-year longing” that can be traced to cave paintings. “Art is about correspondences – making connections with the world and to each other.” 

“You’ll never meet an artist who’s dying saying, ‘God, I wish I’d been president of the Bank of America’” – David Hockney, Videolog, 1988

For Hockney, art was never simply about formal innovation but constantly returned to the question of how we can truly see the world. In the 20th century, when photography was being seen as a true representation of life, Hockney often reflected on the limits of the medium, arguing that a camera on its own could never fully capture the richness of human perception. His photographic “joiners” and collages, such as his photocollage of 650 images, Pearblossom Highway and My Mother Sleeping, Los Angeles, were underscored by this belief, piecing together multiple viewpoints to mimic the way the eye moves. 

In an infamous KCET broadcast of Videolog (1988), David Hockney took the host to the location where his photo montage Pearblossom Highway (1986) was photographed. He talked of how it is the ultimate privilege to be an artist, above any other seemingly prestigious achievement. “You’ll never meet an artist who’s dying saying, ‘God, I wish I’d been president of the Bank of America,’” he said. “But you might meet a dying president of the Bank of America who said, ‘You know, I’d rather have been a poet or an artist.’ It would be that way round, wouldn’t it?”