David Hockney: Bradford's artistic genius who painted the things he loved

David Hockney, who has died aged 88, was Britain's favourite artist - and a man of trenchant views, expressed in the broadest of Yorkshire vowels.

A genius in practically every medium, he worked with paint, photographs and iPads. He did etchings, lithographs, even stained glass windows - equally at home working with the grandeur of opera design and the intimacy of pen and ink.

A peroxide Bradford blond with round glasses and cheese-cutter hat, he set the art world alight in the 1960s, and packed out art galleries more than half a century later.

In 2018, one of his swimming pool paintings sold for nearly £70 million at auction - a record for a living artist. But Hockney was surprised at the public enthusiasm for his work.

He had simply followed one rule: "Paint the things you love".

His father, Kenneth, was a conscientious objector who detested social injustice, nuclear weapons and smoking in equal measure. His mother, Laura, was the backbone of the family: strong-willed and devoutly Methodist.

David was one of five children; a tight-knit, loving unit jammed into a tiny terrace in Bradford. During bombing raids, they hid under the stairs clutching bibles. In 1940, one explosion flattened the street.

He was single-minded and devoted to drawing. The wartime shortage of paper restricted his early efforts to the kitchen floor and hymn books in church.

Later, as a scholarship boy at Bradford Grammar, he refused to do any subject but Art.

"I am no good at science but I can draw," Hockney wrote in one exam. He was popular, funny and the despair of his teachers.

"He should realise that enthusiasm for Art alone is not enough to make a career," said a tutor's misguided report.

At 16, he was allowed to go to art school, arriving in pinstriped suit and bowler hat.

Hockney's appearance may have been flamboyant but his work ethic was Protestant. For 12 hours a day, he worked furiously at his easel.

National Service was spent, like his father, as a conscientious objector. It meant miserable hours washing bodies in a morgue.

But then came the Royal College of Art in London. Hockney lived in an unheated garden shed, spent every waking hour painting and revelled in his newfound bohemia.

The 1960s were in thrall to Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism.

But David's classmate, the American artist RB Kitaj, told him to ignore everyone else and simply paint things he loved. "It was the best advice I ever had," he said.

What interested him was politics, literature and exploring his homosexuality. So one portrait showed himself in an act of love with the American p