David Hockney Biography: Early Life, Paintings, Artworks, Wife, Net Worth
David Hockney (born July 9, 1937) is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. He is regarded as one of the most prominent British painters of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, having made significant contributions to the 1960s pop art movement.
In addition to his homes and studios in Bridlington and London, Hockney has two residences in California, where he has lived intermittently since 1964. These are in Malibu and the Hollywood Hills. In West Hollywood, California, he keeps an office and preserves his archives on Santa Monica Boulevard.
David Hockney Biography and Early Life
David Hockney was born in Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire, England, the fourth of five children of Kenneth Hockney (1904-1978), an accountant’s clerk who later ran his accounting firm and was a conscientious objector during World War II, and Laura (1900-1999), née Thompson, a devout Methodist and strict vegetarian.
In addition to Wellington Primary School, Bradford Grammar School, and Bradford College of Art, where he was taught by Frank Lisle and studied under Derek Boshier, Pauline Boty, Norman Stevens, David Oxtoby, and John Loker, he also attended the Royal College of Art in London, where he met R. B. Kitaj. British Pop art arrived with Hockney and Peter Blake in the Royal College of Art’s New Contemporaries exhibition.
Despite being linked to the movement, Francis Bacon’s early paintings have expressionist influences in a number of them. Because the RCA wouldn’t let him graduate unless he completed a life drawing of a live model, Hockney protested by painting Life Painting for a Diploma in 1962.
He declined to write an essay for the final exam and maintained that he should only be evaluated on his artwork. After recognizing his talent and growing popularity, the RCA modified its rules and awarded him a diploma. He taught at Maidstone College of Art for a short time after leaving the RCA.
In 1964, he started teaching at the University of Iowa. In 1965, Hockney was also a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. After that, from 1966 to 1967, he taught at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1967, he moved on to the University of California, Berkeley.
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Career
After being inspired to utilize vibrant colors in a series of paintings of swimming pools using the then-new acrylic medium, Hockney relocated to Los Angeles in 1964. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he lived in Los Angeles, Paris, and London. As of 2019, Gregory Evans, who joined him in the US in 1976, is still a business partner. In 1974, he began a ten-year romantic engagement with Evans.
In 1978, he rented his first home in Hollywood Hills. After a while, he purchased it and added on to create space for his studio. He also made almost $1.5 million (£1.2 million) in 1999 when he sold his 1,643-square-foot beachfront home at 21039 Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. In the 1990s, Hockney traveled to Yorkshire more often, usually every three months, to see his mother, who died in 1999.
He rarely stayed more than two weeks until 1997, when his dying friend, Jonathan Silver, persuaded him to capture photographs of the area. In the beginning, he accomplished this by painting memories, some of which were from his early childhood. In 1998, he finished painting the well-known Garrowby Hill in Yorkshire.
Hockney continued to travel to Yorkshire, and by 2003, he was painting the area outside using oils and watercolors. He established his home and studio at a renovated bed and breakfast in the seaside town of Bridlington, some 75 miles (121 kilometers) from his birthplace.
His oil paintings after 2005 were influenced by his extensive watercolor studies, such as the Midsummer: East Yorkshire series (2003-2004). His artworks were created by combining two to fifty smaller canvases.
To assist him in visualizing the day’s labor at that scale, he studied digital photographic reproductions. In the spring of 2020, he lived at a farmhouse and studio in Normandy called La Grande Cour during the global COVID-19 pandemic.
David Hockney Wife: Personal Life
At the age of 23, Hockney came out as gay while attending the Royal College of Art in London. The Sexual Offences Act 1967, which was passed in Britain seven years later, decriminalized homosexual behavior. In his artwork, such as the 1961 photograph We Two Boys Together Clinging, which is based on a poem by Walt Whitman, Hockney has explored the essence of gay love.
He portrayed two men, one taking a shower and the other cleaning his back, in his 1963 piece Domestic Scene, Los Angeles. He fell in love with Peter Schlesinger, an art student who posed for paintings and sketches, during the summer of 1966 while he was a professor at UCLA.
Another love partner that Hockney portrayed in his artwork, Gregory Evans, was first introduced in 1971 and started dating in 1974. Evans oversees the David Hockney Studio, and even though their romantic relationship is dissolved, they still collaborate. Longtime friend Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima is Hockney’s current partner. He works as Hockney’s main studio assistant and goes by JP.
Net Worth
MyArtBroker estimates David Hockney’s net worth at roughly £120 million. He is a well-known artist whose work includes paintings, drawings, prints, stage designs, and photographs dating back to the 1960s. According to Wikipedia, his income stems primarily from the selling of his artworks, including the record-breaking sale of “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” for $90 million (£70 million) in 2018.
Social Media
To view more of his art, visit his X (Twitter account)
