{"id":1752,"date":"2026-06-12T10:09:23","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T10:09:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/reliablemovingcrews.com\/?p=1752"},"modified":"2026-06-12T10:09:23","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T10:09:23","slug":"david-hockney-the-british-artist-who-went-in-search-of-californian-colour-dies-at-88","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reliablemovingcrews.com\/?p=1752","title":{"rendered":"David Hockney, the British artist who went in search of Californian colour, dies at 88"},"content":{"rendered":"
June 12 (Reuters) – As a child growing up in gloomy northern England, David Hockney noticed the sharply defined shadows in the Hollywood films of comedy duo Laurel and Hardy.<\/div>
“Strong shadows meant a lot of sun,” the painter recalled to BBC television in 2009. “So I thought, well, wherever that is, it’s always sunny.”<\/div>
Two decades later, Hockney moved to Los Angeles \u200bto immerse himself in that dazzling light.<\/div>
The artist, whose brightly coloured renditions of California would go on to make him one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th \u200cand 21st centuries, died on Thursday, Sky News reported, citing his publicist. He was 88.<\/div>
No cause of death was given.<\/div>

‘HERE I FELT FREE’<\/h2>
Initially, almost as much as his paintings, Hockney was known for his own image \u2014 thick-rimmed spectacles, peroxide hair, shiny gold jacket \u2014 which became a symbol of Britain’s Swinging Sixties.<\/div>
As an art student in the northern English city of Bradford \u2014 where he was born to an accountancy clerk father and a devout Methodist mother \u2014 Hockney rebelled against convention. He gave titles to \u200bhis abstract paintings such as “Going to be a Queen for Tonight” and “Doll Boy” at a time when homosexuality was punishable by prison.<\/div>
To continue his studies, in 1959 he moved to London \u200bwhere he had a meteoric rise in the British pop art movement and rubbed shoulders with stars from dancer Rudolf Nureyev to Mick Jagger.<\/div>
But Hockney yearned \u2060for the excitement he saw in the work of American artists. Using money from the sale of his art, he visited New York for the first time in 1961 \u2014 where he became a friend \u200bof Andy Warhol \u2014 and moved to California three years later.<\/div>
“I thought people who produced such work must live in colour, so I went in search of it,” he is quoted as saying in a biography written \u200bby art critic and friend Peter Adam.<\/div>
“I had spent the first 20 years of my life in the gothic gloom of the North. Here I felt free.”<\/div>
His pictures of swimming pools and naked men in showers became icons of a sun-drenched lifestyle that he documented with luminous acrylic paint before dividing his time between Los Angeles, London and Paris in the late 1960s and 1970s.<\/div>
He remained unpretentious despite his success.<\/div>
“I am actually still a student,” he told Adam. “I just happen \u200bto have quite a lot of credit cards in my pocket.”<\/div>
In 1985, when he was invited to the White House to dine with President Ronald Reagan, Prince Charles and Princess Diana, he was held \u200bup for half an hour by security officers because he was the only guest to arrive on foot, his biographer wrote.<\/div>

‘YOU DON’T RETIRE DOING THIS’<\/h2>
Hockney’s images of love, sex and material wealth led to claims by some art critics \u200cthat his \u2060work was trivial. But he won greater renown than any other British artist of the 20th century.<\/div>
One of his most famous paintings, “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” \u2014 showing a figure swimming underwater and a man gazing into the pool \u2014 sold for $90.3 million in 2018, the most expensive work by a living artist sold at auction at the time.<\/div>
As he grew older and his life turned more domestic, dogs replaced men in Hockney’s work, at a time when many of his friends were dying of AIDS.<\/div>
He said he cried for two days when Stanley, one of his beloved dachshunds, died in 2001, having been immortalised in scores \u200bof paintings and sketches.<\/div>
In the late 1990s, Hockney \u200bbegan returning more frequently to visit his mother \u2060in the northern English county of Yorkshire, where he had grown up, and a terminally ill friend encouraged him to paint the local landscapes.<\/div>
Feeling increasingly lonely, he moved from California to the seaside town of Bridlington on England’s North Sea coast. For a decade he painted clumps of bare trees in winter, fields \u200bfull of ripe crops and tracks stretching towards the gentle rolling hills of the Yorkshire Wolds region.<\/div>
It was the most productive period of his \u200bentire career as he rushed \u2060to capture scenes that, he said, changed more dramatically with the seasons than did those of California.<\/div>
“You don’t retire doing this,” he told the BBC in his broad Yorkshire accent when asked about his unflagging energy. “You just do it until you fall over.”<\/div>
The former enfant terrible of British art, a cigarette almost always in his hand, never stopped trying new techniques. He used faxes to share his work and then iPads to produce it. His \u2060Yorkshire paintings led \u200bto a stained-glass window for Westminster Abbey, in central London.<\/div>
In 2018, Hockney bought a farmhouse in Normandy, in northern France, \u200band turned his eye to the fields and flowers of his garden there. The 90-metre-long “A Year in Normandie” frieze was inspired by the nearly 1,000-year-old Bayeux Tapestry.<\/div>
Hockney’s work ethic \u2014 instilled in him from getting up daily at 6 o’clock to work in hospitals \u200bfor two years, when he refused to do his military service in the army \u2014 barely relented in his later years.<\/div>
“I tend to think that you should work every day,” he said. “And I do.”<\/div>