David Hockney, the British artist who went in search of Californian colour, dies at 88

As a child growing up in gloomy northern England, David Hockney noticed the sharply defined shadows in the Hollywood films of comedy duo Laurel and Hardy.

“Strong shadows meant a lot of sun,” the painter recalled to BBC television in 2009. “So I thought, well, wherever that is, it’s always sunny.”

Two decades later, Hockney moved to Los Angeles to immerse himself in that dazzling light.

The artist, whose brightly coloured renditions of California would go on to make him one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, has died, Sky News reported on Friday. He was 88.

Initially, almost as much as his paintings, Hockney was known for his own image — thick-rimmed spectacles, peroxide hair, shiny gold jacket — which became a symbol of Britain’s Swinging Sixties.

As an art student in the northern English city of Bradford — where he was born to an accountancy clerk father and a devout Methodist mother — Hockney rebelled against convention. He gave titles to his abstract paintings such as “Going to be a Queen for Tonight” and “Doll Boy” at a time when homosexuality was punishable by prison.

To continue his studies, in 1959 he moved to London where he had a meteoric rise in the British pop art movement and rubbed shoulders with stars from dancer Rudolf Nureyev to Mick Jagger.

But Hockney yearned for the excitement he saw in the work of American artists. Using money from the sale of his art, he visited New York for the first time in 1961 — where he became a friend of Andy Warhol — and moved to California three years later.

“I thought people who produced such work must live in colour, so I went in search of it,” he is quoted as saying in a biography written by art critic and friend Peter Adam.

“I had spent the first 20 years of my life in the gothic gloom of the North. Here I felt free.”

His pictures of swimming pools and naked men in showers became icons of a sun-drenched lifestyle that he documented with luminous acrylic paint before dividing his time between Los Angeles, London and Paris in the late 1960s and 1970s.

“I am actually still a student,” he told Adam. “I just happen to have quite a lot of credit cards in my pocket.”

In 1985, when he was invited to the White House to dine with President Ronald Reagan, Prince Charles and Princess Diana, he was held up for half an hour by security officers because he was the only guest to arrive on foot, his biographer wrote.

Hockney’s images of love, sex and material wealth led to claims by some art critics that his work was trivial. But he won greater renown than any other British artist