David Hockney: Awareness Post

David Hockney is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. He's considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th and 21st century because of his contributions to the pop art movement of the 1960s. Born in Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire in 1937, he attended Bradford College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. At the Royal College of Art, Hockney and Peter Blake were featured in the exhibition New Contemporaries, which marked the emergence of British Pop art. Although he's associated with the Pop art movement, his early work features more expressionist elements. In 1964, Hockney moved to Los Angeles, where he made a series of paintings of swimming pools in acrylic, a medium that was fairly new and offered shockingly vibrant colors in his work.

He's explored a wide variety of mediums, including painting, drawing, printmaking, watercolors, photography, a fax machine, paper pulp, and even iPad drawings. His subjects also vary, from portraits of his friends, his dogs, stage designs, and of course, pools.

In 1968, Hockney painted portraits of friends, lovers, and relatives just under life-size in a realistic style. In addition to depicting those around him, Hockney has created over 300 self-portraits in total. He began with a lithograph titled Self Portrait in 1954 and continued to work on etchings during his time at the Royal College of Art. In 1965 Hockney created The Hollywood Collection, a series of lithographs recreating the art collection of a Hollywood star, as a commission for the print workshop Gemini G.E.L. In the early 1980s, he explored photo collages, creating both landscapes and portraits. Later, he also worked with the Quantel Paintbox in December of 1985, a computer that allowed artists to sketch directly onto the screen. He has continued to explore with different technologies, including iPads and phones. On top of his wide variety of mediums, he also created stage designs in London's Royal Court Theatre, at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera, the Metropolitan Opera House, and a variety of other events and theatres.

His work has been featured in over 400 solo exhibitions and over 500 group exhibitions. His first one-man show was in 1963, at Kasmin Limited, and his popularity has exploded since then.

I really appreciate the use of bold, bright colors to create distinct shapes in Hockney's work, and I think it's something I could draw inspiration from in my own work. He creates very nice backgrounds with enough depth to be interesting, even when much of the work could easily be very two dimensional. I need to work on adding perspective or at least some kind of depth into my art, so Hockney could be a really valuable resource.

Collections:

• Honolulu Museum of Art

• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

• National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

• Art Institute of Chicago

• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

• Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark

• National Portrait Gallery, London

• Tate, U.K.

• J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

• Los Angeles County Museum of Art

• Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

• Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

• Museum of Modern Art, New York

• Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

• Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

• Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo

• Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova, Turku, Finland

• Mumok, Ludwig Foundation, Vienna

• Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.

• Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

• Muscarelle Museum of Art, Williamsburg, VA

Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures), 1972, Acrylic on Canvas, 85 x 120"

Stanley and Boodgie, Horizontal Dogs, 1995, Intaglio, 39 x 46 cm

My Parents, 1977, oil on canvas,