1937David Hockney is born in Bradford, Yorkshire, on 9 July, the son of Kenneth and Laura Hockney and the fourth of five children (Paul, Philip, Margaret, David and John).
1962Exhibits four Demonstrations of Versatility at the Young Contemporaries. Becomes friends with designer Ossie Clark. Visits Florence, Rome and Berlin with Jeff Goodman. Graduates from the Royal College of Art with a gold medal. Moves into Powis Terrace in the Notting Hill district of London. Paints The First Marriage.Life Painting for Myself, 1962.
Domestic Scene, Notting Hill, 1963
1963Paints The Second Marriage and Play within a Play. Begins a series of double-figure domestic scene paintings and shower paintings. His first solo exhibition, David Hockney: Pictures with People In takes place at John Kasmin¡¯s gallery and is a sell out. Hockney begins to lead a very social and public life. His name is often mentioned in the press. Commissioned by the Sunday Times to make some drawings of Egypt, he travels there in October and produces forty coloured crayon drawings. Wins the graphic prize at the 3rd Paris Biennale. In December he goes to New York and meets Andy Warhol, Dennis Hopper and Henry Geldzahler, Curator of Twentieth-Century Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Shell Garage, Luxor, 1963
Recent
2005Hockney works on a new series of almost life-size single and double oil portraits painted directly onto canvas with no pre-drawing. In February Hand, Eye, Heart, an exhibition of his Yorkshire landscapes, opens at LA Louver gallery. The thirty-six watercolour studies are exhibited as one work. Hockney returns to England and spends the summer in Bridlington where he paints the East Yorkshire landscape in oil en plein air. Exhibits the single standing figures in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. In preparation for David Hockney Portraits, he continues painting portraits including a series of paintings of Celia Birtwell¡¯s granddaughter, Isabella. In September he visits Leipzig, Dresden and Berlin. Returns to Bridlington to paint the Yorkshire landscape in the autumn. Midsummer: East Yorkshire is exhibited in the Gilbert Collection at Somerset House, London.
The Photographer and his Daughter, 2005
BRIDLINGTON, England
IT was a brilliantly sunny autumn day in East Yorkshire, and the artist David Hockney was taking me for a drive through the countryside. "What it is I'm going to show you is an alleyway of trees," he said in his gruff Yorkshire burr as he turned his open-topped Audi roadster off the one-lane road into an even narrower byway bordered by swaying beech, sycamore and ash trees. "When I moved up here, I recognized this is really very rare and beautiful."