David Hockney
Born 1937

Mary Fedden, in a recent interview for the Sunday Times Magazine (Alex Delmar-Morgan Aug 06, 2006) said "When I taught David Hockney in the early 1960s, he was a natural, he didn't need teaching; he knew exactly what he was doing. He was a sweet boy and unlike some students, he never called for help. We all realised how good he was, he had a wonderful Bradford accent and was, in a way, unsophisticated, but his understanding of what he was doing was incredible. I like that he is willing to experiment: he hasn't stuck to one way of painting, that is what has made him famous."

Over the last forty years, David Hockney has become a master of photography, stage design, printmaking, drawing and painting. He is able to express himself using line and colour in a wider range of media than any of his contemporaries in the British art scene.

This scintillating career began at the Bradford school of art in 1953. Hockney graduated with distinction and took a three-year students’ course at the Royal College of Art in London. Ten years after his introduction at Bradford, David Hockney held his first solo exhibition at the Kasmin Gallery in London. This show was the first of a long line of exhibitions including major retrospectives in London, Los Angeles, New York and Hamburg. Recently Paris honoured him with a comprehensive Hockney Season.

What Mary Fedden recognised in the early ‘60s has evolved into an amazingly creative versatility, ranging from his thought provoking early work through his Californian studies of swimming pools in the 1970s, his photo collages of the 1980s and his landscapes painted in the last decade of the 20th century. Not to be forgotten are his portraits, where he seeks to express the sitters’ personality as much through the body as from the facial expression.

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