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David Hockney, who has died aged 88, was widely considered to have been Britain's greatest living artist, said The Daily Telegraph. Instantly recognisable, with his bleached-blond hair, round glasses, impish smile and "ever-smouldering cigarette", he was for decades a subject of fascination to the world's media, as Picasso had been a generation earlier. And just as Picasso once commented that he never produced a painting as a work of art – it was all research – Hockney was a man of restless curiosity, who for more than 60 years never stopped the process of experimentation and reinvention.
What drove him was an intense need to understand "the way the world works, how the eye sees it and how the brush sets it down", said Laura Freeman in The Times. "What happens when raindrops strike still water? Or a body breaks the surface of a swimming pool? How do you capture a glass of water, transparency on transparency, or shafts of sunlight on a polished parquet floor?"
He was a superb draughtsman, but there was no medium he would not try in his effort to depict the world as it is seen. He worked in oils, acrylics, watercolours, charcoal, pen and ink, pencil, felt-tips, crayons; he produced etchings and drypoints; and made use Polaroid cameras, Xerox photocopiers, inkjet printers and the iPad. His inspirations ranged from Monet to Chinese scrolls to the Bayeux Tapestry, and he found inspiration in everything California's epic landscapes to the graffiti in public lavatories.
He was fascinated by the mechanics of image-making, said Kelsey Ables in The Atlantic – and, as he put it, "any technology that is about pictures". In 2001, he published an art historical book in which he laid out his carefully researched but hotly debated theory that the likes of Caravaggio and van Eyck had used devices such as concave mirrors and projecting lenses to achieve realism.
David Hockney, who has died aged 88, was widely considered to have been Britain's greatest living artist, said The Daily Telegraph. Instantly recognisable, with his bleached-blond hair, round glasses, impish smile and "ever-smouldering cigarette", he was for decades a subject of fascination to the world's media, as Picasso had been a generation earlier. And just as Picasso once commented that he never produced a painting as a work of art – it was all research – Hockney was a man of restless curiosity, who for more than 60 years never stopped the process of experimentation and reinvention.
What drove him was an intense need to understand "the way the world works, how the eye sees it and how the brush sets it down", said Laura Freeman in The Times. "What happens when raindrops strike still water? Or a body breaks the surface of a swimming pool? How do you capture a glass of water, transparency on transparency, or shafts of sunlight on a polished parquet floor?"
He was a superb draughtsman, but there was no medium he would not try in his effort to depict the world as it is seen. He worked in oils, acrylics, watercolours, charcoal, pen and ink, pencil, felt-tips, crayons; he produced etchings and drypoints; and made use Polaroid cameras, Xerox photocopiers, inkjet printers and the iPad. His inspirations ranged from Monet to Chinese scrolls to the Bayeux Tapestry, and he found inspiration in everything California's epic landscapes to the graffiti in public lavatories.
He was fascinated by the mechanics of image-making, said Kelsey Ables in The Atlantic – and, as he put it, "any technology that is about pictures". In 2001, he published an art historical book in which he laid out his carefully researched but hotly debated theory that the likes of Caravaggio and van Eyck had used devices such as concave mirrors and projecting lenses to achieve realism.
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