DAVID HOCKNEY

Mother I, Yorkshire Moors, August 1985 #1

David Hockney's mother, Laura, was born in Bradford in 1900. She was an inspiration for his art and was the subject of many of his portraits throughout her life until she died in 1999 aged 98.

Pearblossom Highway, 11-18th April 1986 #2

This collage of over seven hundred fifty individual photographs took more than a week to photograph and five studio days to compose. This ambitious and creative process provided Hockney with a unique means to comment upon the nature of observation.

Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1971

A Bigger Splash, 1967

Nichols Canyon,1980

Beverly Hills Housewife, 1966

A Lawn Being Sprinkled, 1967

Model with Unfinished Self-Portrait, 1977

Three Chairs with a Section of a Picasso Mural, 1970

Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, 1970

DAVID HOCKNEY is also one of my very favorite painters. "One of the foremost painters, designers, and photographers of the 20th-century contemporary art scene in the United States and England, David Hockney was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, England on July 9, 1937, to Laura and Kenneth Hockney.

He experimented with numerous styles including that of Italian master, Piero della Francesca,(c. 1416-1492) and Hockney became one of the most important portraitists of his era, renowned for depictions of family and people he met in his extensive travels.

He studied at Bradford College of Art in 1957 and in 1962 at the Royal College of Art. In the 1960s, much of his work was a homage to his heroes that included Picasso, Dubuffet, and Matisse combined with the influence of Abstract Expressionism. In the mid 1970s, he spent three years in Paris and then traveled to Los Angeles where he did a series of lithographs and also did his first opera design, which was for Stravinsky's "The Rake's Progress." In 1988, the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, awarded him an honorary doctorate.

He has had numerous one-man shows including at the Kasmin Gallery, 1963-1989; in New York at the Museum of Modern Art in 1964 and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1988; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Holland in 1966; and the Tate Gallery in London in 1988. He has also been a stage set designer for the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.

Hockney has lectured at universities including the University of Iowa in 1964, the University of Colorado in 1965, the University of California in Los Angeles in 1966, and the University of California-Berkeley in 1967.

In 1998, he did a series of vivid pastels on the Grand Canyon called "David Hockney: Space & Line," that were exhibited in Paris at Centre George Pompidou from January 27 to April 26th, 1999, and following that for a month at the Richard Gray Gallery in New York City.

The paintings are large-scale, impressionist close-ups of the Canyon in the morning light. In 1999, he won the Wollaston award for some of his Canyon paintings, which were exhibited at London's Royal Academy.

In 2001, Hockney's book "Secret Knowledge" was published by Viking Press and stirred much discussion with his assertion that many of the Old Masters including Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Durer frequently used optical devices to achieve their near perfect realism. His theory is that the mirror, the camera obscura, and the camera lucida were widely used by artists as early as the 1400s and that the introduction of photography in the 19th century freed artists from realism."

(Text from www.askart.com/ )