Web Quotableonline.com Frasescelebres.org Greatbookscollection.org

David Hockney,Order of the Companions of Honour|CH
(born July 9, 1937) is a United Kingdom|British
artist, based in California. His work is largely
personal and autobiographical, with his paintings
of swimming pools in Los Angeles, California|Los
Angeles among his best known pieces.

Hockney was born in Bradford, England|Bradford and
educated at Bradford Grammar School and the Royal
College of Art in London where he met R. B. Kitaj.
He became associated with pop art, but his early
works also display expressionist elements, not
dissimilar to certain works by Francis Bacon
(painter)|Francis Bacon. Sometimes, as in We Two
Boys Together Clinging (1961), named after a poem
by Walt Whitman, these works make reference to his
homosexuality.

Later, a visit to California, where he settled,
inspired Hockney to make a series of oil paintings
of swimming pools in Los Angeles, California|Los
Angeles. These are executed in a more realistic
style and use vibrant colours. He also made
prints, portraits of friends, and stage designs
for Glyndebourne, La Scala and the Metropolitan
Opera in New York City.

Hockney studied lithography in art school in
Bradford, Yorkshire. His first print was Myself
and My Heroes (1961), where he appears beside a
haloed Mahatma Gandhi and Walt Whitman. His first
major project in printmaking was a series of
sixteen etchings where he represents Hogarth's
Rake's Progress autobiographically. In the 1960s
in California, he created with Ken Tyler another
series of prints titled A Hollywood Collection.
Many of his lithographs are portraits of his
friends, most frequently of them Celia Birtwell.
His first prints during the 1980s were two large
lithographs of Celia published by Gemini G.E.L.
(the studio started by Ken Tyler) in 1982. Hockney
also made two etchings honoring Pablo Picasso,
whose work he admired and was influenced by, after
Picasso's death in 1973.

Hockney also worked with photography, or more
precisely - photocollaging. Using varying numbers
(~5-150) of small polaroid snaps or
photolab-prints of a single subject Hockney
arranged a patchwork to make a composite image.
Because these photos are taken from different
perspectives and at slightly different times, the
result is work which has an affinity with cubism,
affinity which was some of Hockney's major aims -
discussing the way human vision works. Some of
these pieces are landscapes, others portraits.

These photographic collages appeared mostly in his
works between 1970 and 1986. He referred to them
as "joiners". He began this style of art by taking
polaroid photographs of one subject and arranging
them into a grid layout. The subject would
actually move while being photographed so that the
piece would show the movements of the subject seen
from the photographer's perspective. In later
works Hockney changed his technique and moved the
camera around the subject instead.

Hockney's creation of the joiners were never
planned, he just sort of discovered them. He
noticed in the late sixties that photographers
were using cameras with wide-angle lenses to take
pictures. He didn't like them because the
photographs were distorted in ways that a person
never sees. It was not consistent with human
vision. He was working on a painting of a living
room in Los Angeles in which the living room and
terrance were combined into one picture at the
time. He took polaroid shots of the living room
and glued them together, not intending for them to
be a composition on their own. Upon looking at the
final composition, he realized it created a
narrative as if the viewer was moving through the
room. He began to work more and more with
photography after this discovery and even stopped
painting for a period of time to pursue this new
style of photography.

Hockney was commissioned to design the cover and a
series of pages for the December 1985 issue of the
French edition of Vogue magazine. In consistency
with his interest in cubism and admiration for
Pablo Picasso, Hockney chose to paint Celia
Birtwell (who appears in several of his works)
with different views of her facial features as if
the eye had scanned her face diagonally.

Another important commission of his was to draw
with the Quantel Paintbox, a computer program that
allowed the artist to sketch direct onto the
monitor screen. This commission was taken by
Hockney in December 1985. Using this program was
similar to drawing on the Mylar for prints which
he had much experience in. His works were so
successful that a video was made while he was
using the Quantel and broadcast by the BBC. His
work with the Quantel showed him that new
technology could be used for art.

In the 2001 television programme and book, Secret
Knowledge, Hockney posited that the Old Masters
had used the camera obscura, a series of lenses or
mirrors, to project an image of their models onto
the canvas, which they had then traced around,
enabling them to achieve very high levels of
realism.

In 1974, Hockney was the subject of Jack Hazan's
film, A Bigger Splash (named after one of
Hockney's swimming pool paintings from 1967).
Hockney was made a Companion of Honour in 1997 and
is also a Royal Academician. Many of Hockney's
works are now housed in the old mill Salts Mill in
Saltaire, near his home town of Bradford.

==External links==
*http://www.saltsmill.org.uk/galleries.htm Salts
Mill in Saltaire, Yorkshire, England, is part
owned by Hockney's brother and contains a
permanent exhibition of Hockney's work.
*http://www.davidhockney.com DavidHockney.com
tribute site.
*http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/collect
ions/20c/hockney.asp Peter getting out of Nick's
pool (1966)
*http://www.artrenewal.org/articles/2004/Hockney/y
oder1.asp 'Why David Hockney Should Not Be Taken
Seriously' a critique of Hockney's suggestion that
many Old Masters achieved realism in their
paintings by using a camera obscura.
*http://www.hirohurl.net/chevalier.html Secret
Knowledge: A Review of Hockney's book.
*http://www.ipetitions.com/campaigns/debunking_dav
id_hockney_theory/ A petition against Hockney's
view on the camera obscura