David Hockney

Jacob Cavenee

Art 177-Digital Photography

Professor Pease

24 April 2016

David Hockney

            David Hockney was born in Bradford, England on July 9, 1937. Admiring art from Picasso, Mattisse, and Fragonard, his parents encouraged him to express his art and study it in the future (bio.com). Hockney attended the Bradford school of art from 1953 to 1957, then was enlisted into to military service to finish his national requirements (bio.com). After her was finished, Hockney graduated from the Royal College of Art in London in 1959 (bio.com). Hockney was a very good student, receiving awards and selling his pieces to private collectors. For Hockney’s early work, his paintings incorporated a lot of his literary learnings, and used fragments of poems and quotations from Walt Whitman (bio.com).

Hockney’s first visit to California was in 1963, and eventually moved there in 1966. California became a major influence on Hockney’s paintings. Hockney’s obsession with the pools led to his iconic work labeled A Bigger Splash (bio.com). This is when Hockney’s style evolved and was considered to be more of a realist (bio.com). Another famous work from Hockney was his joiner series, influenced by his paintings of California homes interior and exterior. A joiner is an assemblage of polaroid photos laid out in a grid (bio.com). Stumbling upon this series on accident, Hockney was working on a painting of a living room and he took a series of photos for his reference, and fixed them together so he could paint from the image (bio.com). He realized that the collages he was making were an art form unto itself, and began to create more (bio.com). His inspiration for this series came from when he would lay and fix the photos how he wanted them to be. Cubism is a style of painting and sculpture developed in the early 20th century, characterized chiefly by an emphasis on formal structure, the reduction of natural forms to their geometrical equivalents, and the organization of the planes of a represented object independently of representational requirements. A main figure associated with cubism is Pablo Picasso, a big inspiration to Hockney.

            By the mid 1970’s, Hockney started to become more involved with photography. He abandoned everything but painting to really focus on photography projects. In the 1980’s, Hockney returned to painting, primarily focused on seascapes, flowers and portraits of loved ones (bio.com). The marriage of art and technology became an ongoing fascination, he used laser fax machines and laser printers in 1990, and in 2009 he started using the Brushes app on apple products to create paintings (bio.com). In 2011, Hockney was voted most influential British artist of all time (bio.com).

Works Citied

"David Hockney." Bio.com. A&E Networks Television, n.d. Web. 25 Apr. 2016.

"The Definition of Cubism." Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com, n.d. Web. 25 Apr. 2016.