Notes From Psychick Albion

David Hockney 1937-2026

"A flower blossoms for its own joy"

David Hockney was one of the greatest British painters of the post-war period and the most impressive in his use of colour. His early work is interesting in its own right but it was his move to Los Angeles in 1964 that suddenly impressed upon him the explosive power of brightness, colour and space. The LA light hit his retina hard and left an afterimage that informed his painting ever after. His vision became an inextricable thread in the British cultural move from a black and white world of rationing and poverty into a world of the white heat of technology. He was always keen to embrace new technologies such as fax machines and iPads but his painting has an analogue beauty that owes nothing to those innovations. Similarly, his ongoing interest in experimenting with perspective was really secondary to his instinctive grasp of how to fill space with colour and brightness. Although his work became popular just as colour was becoming established in TV and film he retained a unique ability to extract colour and brightness from the subjects of his paintings as though he were communing with them. He sought colour as a fundamental essence rather than a filter. The English cultural sensibility tends to equate darkness and complexity with higher art, and colour and simplicity with lower art, or entertainment, but Hockney’s work is defiant in disrupting this hierarchy. By seeking out those spaces that made his heart sing he was able to summon forth the colourful dance that lives at the heart of all things and present it to the viewer as a direct object of joy. He will be remembered as an English visionary.