What David Hockney said about art was right
This week's Athena looks back at what the famous artist thought about his artform.
The colourful paintings and familiar bespectacled face of David Hockney have figured largely in the news over the past weeks following the announcement of the artist’s death at the age of 88.
Born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, he moved to London and then Los Angeles, California, in 1964, where his paintings captured a sense of the West Coast American idyll. His rediscovery of his native Yorkshire landscape towards the end of his life helped earn him popular recognition in Britain. His longevity was one foundation of his success.
Another was the remarkable number of times he was able to reinvent himself, repeatedly producing fresh art at every stage in his long career. Bound up with that freshness was an enthusiasm for looking at and exploring colour, shadow (or the lack of it) and perspective.
His fascination with technology was important, too. Most famously perhaps, it was expressed in his use of iPads to produce vibrant images. One such was the design he produced for the Queen Elizabeth II stained-glass window at Westminster Abbey, unveiled in 2018. It has helped further that his work was free from the didacticism that characterises so much contemporary art.
His art was celebratory, rather than politically or socially charged. Hockney was, in addition, a supremely good and highly articulate self-publicist. Some obituaries imply that he was a figure whom we should recall, but it is surely closer to the truth to say that he never went away. Whether through interviews, documentaries or lecturing, he was a continuous public presence over the past half century or more talking about Art.
At the root of Hockney’s success, however, was a real and particular skill: he could draw. His facility in this regard was what allowed him to turn his hand successfully to so many things. No less importantly, his own draughtsmanship gave him an appreciation for Old Masters and their technical achievement. It is surprisingly rare to find contemporary artists who genuinely admire such work. Some, indeed, struggle to conceal their patronising disdain for it. By contrast, Hockney studied it and formulated his own opinions about it.
A case in point — and one that chimed with his own wider interests in technology—was his assertion that Vermeer used a camera obscura to paint. He also drew inspiration from other traditions of art to enrich his own, exploring the use, for example, of multiple points of perspective. Perhaps as important as the work he produced, however, are two ideas that he repeatedly expounded.
The first is that looking encourages us to see things in different ways. It’s one of those observations that is at once blindingly obvious, yet merits repetition because it remains so easy to forget as we race around and see only what we already recognise. The other is that it is enough for art merely to be beautiful. How refreshing that is to hear. Athena wholeheartedly agrees.
This feature originally appeared in the June 24, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.
