David Hockney died on June 11, 2026, at his home in London. On the morning of June 12, the news broke, and I began reading obituaries and remembrances of his extraordinary life. My sister and I traded a few text messages about the news, and soon after, she called me while I was on my morning walk.
“I want to know why you said that David Hockney was your favorite living painter,” she asked.
One of the top contemporary British artists, Hockney’s bright Pop Art paintings of vividly colored swimming pools and landscapes became his trademark style, portraying his life in Southern California, his home for many years. Portraits of friends, relatives, and lovers — some rendered life-sized on large canvases — served to document his personal and professional relationships over time. Hockney could use his brushes to create loose, gestural paintings or switch gears and become a photorealist with a bold sense of color, depicting human subjects in various interiors.
David Hockney was also one of the first painters of his generation to embrace technology as an art form. He utilized the iPhone Brushes application, once admitting, “I draw flowers every day on my iPhone and send them to my friends, so they get fresh flowers every morning.” Other popular Hockney media included stage design, photo collage, and printmaking.
It’s hard to imagine a character in our post-Hockney art world that is as well-known professionally and personally to the general public. He was instantly identifiable, with tousled blonde hair and trademark round glasses blending perfectly with his bright, flamboyant sense of dress and personal style. I noted an online wordless tribute to his loss, a simple artwork depicting a swimming pool with the iconic round glasses floating in a sea of blue.
I told my sister a story about when I was in college earning my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting. One morning, a drawing exercise began as our professor handed out apples from a barrel. Each of us was instructed to draw the apple before us. Easy, we thought. Everyone knows what an apple looks like. What we couldn’t predict was our professor picking up those same apples again, placing them back in the barrel, and instructing all of us to find our apple using the drawing we’d created.
Everyone knows what an apple looks like, true, but we had forgotten that the singular object in front of us was unlike anything we’d ever seen. The fruit existed in a unique moment of ripeness, color, light, and placement on our individual desks. For that reason, each apple deserved our fresh attention. Our preconceived ideas prevented us from accurately rendering this completely unique object inside of a moment.
Our minds prevented us from seeing.
In his later years, Hockney returned to his native Yorkshire, England to embark on a series of massive landscapes made from multiple canvases depicting nature imagery on a colossal scale. The execution of these monumental paintings was documented in the 2009 film David Hockney: A Bigger Picture. The artist is shown in his studio and in the countryside, painting and discussing his methodologies. The subjects are given the typical Hockney treatment. Trees are rendered in rich, seemingly nonnaturalistic pop colors, yet Hockney shows the camera that the trees’ shadow really is purple. He returned to the same locales at different times of the day, creating radically different paintings out of the same bare trees. Like Monet’s series of haystack paintings, the trees were transformed as shadows shifted in the changing sunlight.
In 2014, the de Young museum honored this period of Hockney’s work by presenting the largest exhibition in its history. More than 300 works in 18,000 square feet of the gallery were devoted to the first comprehensive survey of David Hockney’s work since 2002, remaining arguably the most prolific and acclaimed period of the artist’s nearly seven-decade career.
Hockney still saw his subjects with new eyes. In the Yorkshire countryside, he could revisit the same tree or pile of leaves on a different day under a new arrangement of clouds and paint with the same level of exuberance in response to that moment.
If Hockney had been in that class with us so long ago, I’m quite sure he could have found his apple in the barrel based on his drawing
“In the end nobody knows how it’s done — how art is made. It can’t be explained. Optical devices are just tools. Understanding a tool doesn’t explain the magic of creation. Nothing can.” — David Hockney
Throughout his 88 years, David Hockney, raconteur, style icon, and supreme talent, constantly sought out new territory instead of revisiting his celebrated past. His art happened in the moment, and he helped us to see.
