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Although a seductive depiction of a dream place, A Bigger Splash is not just about that. According to Hockney, the real subject is the split-second moment of the splash itself, frozen on canvas. Hockney painted the picture from a photograph of a splash taken by someone else.
- Summary of David Hockney
- Accomplishments
- Biography of David Hockney
David Hockney's bright swimming pools, split-level homes and suburban Californian landscapes are a strange brew of calm and hyperactivity. Shadows appear to have been banished from his acrylic canvases of the 1960s, slick as magazine pages. Flat planes exist side-by-side in a patchwork, muddling our sense of distance. Hockney's unmistakable style i...
Like other Pop artists, Hockney revived figurative painting in a style that referenced the visual language of advertising. What separates him from others in the Pop movement is his obsession with C...Hockney insists on personal subject matter - another thing that separates him from most other Pop artists. He depicts the domestic sphere - scenes from his own life and that of friends. This aligns...Hockney was openly gay, and has remained a staunch advocate for gay rights. In the context of a macho art scene that dismissed "pretty color" as effeminate, Hockney's bright greens, purples, pinks,...In actively seeking to imitate photographic effects in his work, Hockney is a forerunner of the Photorealists. He is also a heretic among purists who feel that painting should rely only on the arti...Childhood
One of five children, David Hockney was born into a working-class family in Yorkshire, northern England, in the industrial city of Bradford. His father, a conscientious objector during the Second World War, "had a kind heart" remembers Hockney. "He thought there should be justice in the world". He also romanticized the ideals of the Communist party in Russia. While adopting his father's anti-war stance, Hockney remained resistant to ideologies and hierarchies. As a schoolboy, Hockney says of...
Early Training
At 16, Hockney was admitted to the acclaimed Bradford School of Art, where he studied traditional painting and life drawing alongside Norman Stevens, David Oxtoby, and John Loker. Unlike most of his peers Hockney was from a more humble family, and he worked tirelessly, especially in his life drawing classes, recalling: "I was there from nine in the morning till nine at night." In 1957 he was called up for National Service, but as a conscientious objector he served out his time as a hospital o...
Mature Period
Hockney's first solo show, held in 1963 at John Kasmin's gallery, proved very successful. The following year he traveled to Los Angeles for the first time, where he met leading intellectual and artistic figures including Christopher Isherwood, and designer Ossie Clarke, with whom he struck up a close friendship and later traveled to the Grand Canyon. He would later be best man at Clarke's wedding to Celia Birtwell, of whom he would paint and draw many portraits. Over the following few years,...
- British-American
- July 9, 1937
- Bradford, UK
Intentionally or inadvertently, Hockney has never disconcerted his public — there is simply not enough grit in his oyster. The edgiest he has been is in his images of his gay milieu, notably the 13 etchings for Illustrations for Fourteen Poems from CP Cavafy he made in 1966, a year before the legalisation of homosexuality.
Hockney has often played satirically with abstract art. Here the red circle on aquamarine recalls the work of several abstract painters of the late 1960s. In fact this image is a close recreation of a photograph of a floating rubber ring as indicated by the depiction of the pool’s stone surround and the bubbles of its water inlet.
- Hockney was born in the city of Bradford, in the English county of Yorkshire, in 1937. Bradford had been a hub of the wool trade since the industrial revolution.
- David was the fourth of five children born to Laura and Kenneth Hockney. The former was a strict vegetarian and devout Methodist, the latter a clerk at a local accountancy firm who was also an amateur artist (with a particular fondness for photography).
- As a young man, Hockney was a conscientious objector – meaning he refused to complete his National Service in the army. He spent two years as an orderly at St Luke’s Hospital in Bradford instead.
- After initial studies at Bradford School of Art, in 1959 he moved to London to attend the Royal College of Art (RCA) – where he counted Derek Boshier, Peter Phillips, Allen Jones and Patrick Caulfield among his peers.
Hockney’s own engagement with Picasso began in the late 1960s, and in an unexpected place. He is the only later artist to take Picasso’s neoclassical drawing idiom of the early 1920s – a matter of taut lines, without a single shadow – and use it as a personal means of expression.
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Hogarth's precedent had given Hockney licence to turn his life's pleasures and pitfalls into art. But perhaps Hogarth's greatest bequest is the way he handled satire.
