David Hockney and Learning to Really Look

I heard the news on Friday morning, and like a lot of people from Bradford, it landed somewhere I wasn't quite expecting. David Hockney has died, aged 88, peacefully at home in London, a month before his 89th birthday. The obituaries will rightly talk about A Bigger Splash, about Los Angeles swimming pools, about sixty years at the centre of British art. I want to write about something smaller: what it was like to grow up as an artist in Bradford with David Hockney everywhere, both literally and figuratively, and why, when people ask who has influenced my work, I always end up saying his name. Cliché as that feels.

Salts Mill Was Just Somewhere You Went

If you went to school in Bradford in the 1990s, Bradford Grammar School especially, Hockney wasn't a name in a textbook. He was a presence. Salts Mill, the old textile mill at Saltaire that he helped turn into a permanent home for his work, was a regular school trip. Not a special occasion, just somewhere you went, the way other schools might go to a local museum. You'd walk around a room full of his paintings the way you might walk around a room at home. That familiarity does something. It takes the work off the wall marked "great art" and puts it back into the world you actually live in.

Then there were the odder moments. Homework that had, somewhere in its origin story, come from Hockney himself. Fax machine artwork: actual faxes, sent over from his studio in California and printed off for us to look at, at a time when a fax from America still felt like a small miracle. And the shout that would go round the art department: "Hockney's coming in today." He'd turn up to the lunchtime art club occasionally, this enormous figure in British art, and just be there, looking at what a room full of school children were drawing.

It's hard to overstate what that does to a teenager who's starting to think of themselves as an artist. It tells you, without anyone needing to say it out loud, that painting, looking, making, is a thing people from here do. Not people from London. Not people from somewhere else. People from here.

Garrowby Hill and the Road I Know

And then there's the work itself, which for me has always been as much about subject as it is about style. Garrowby Hill, that long, twisting drop through the Yorkshire Wolds down into the Vale of York, is a road I've driven up and down more times than I can count. Hockney painted it. Not as a postcard view, but as the place it actually is: the bend, the gradient, the way the land opens up underneath you as you come over the top.

When I'm out walking a course before I paint it, trying to feel where the ground falls away, where the light catches a slope, I'm doing a version of what I watched him do to that road. Looking properly. Looking until the place gives something up.

Why It's Still True

So when people ask what's influenced my work, I say David Hockney, and I know exactly how that sounds: like every artist from Yorkshire says the same thing, because of course they do. But it's true, and being true doesn't stop being true just because it's common. His presence in Bradford wasn't influence in the abstract sense you read about in art history books. It was influence in the very literal sense of someone being physically present in the rooms where I was learning to paint.

His passing is a genuinely sad thing, not just for artists, but for Bradford, for Saltaire, for all the communities that got to claim a small piece of him as their own. But presence like that doesn't just disappear. It's in the children who go round Salts Mill on a school trip next year, and the ones after that, the way it was in me. Bradford will feel David Hockney for decades to come, and so, in my own small way, will I, every time I stand in front of a landscape and try to really look at it before I paint it.