May 18, 2026 – Serpentine North Gallery, Hyde Park, London – Strolling through the artist’s ninety-meter, panoramic, labyrinthine, hall of mirrors, ravishingly technicolor visual journal of his Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts About Painting, I remember when I first encountered the work of David Hockney, “the boy from Bradford,” some thirty miles northeast of the Manchester metropolis where I spent my junior year at the University six decades ago. On one of my trips “up to London” I happened upon a book/folio of Hockney’s sinuous etchings in homage to Fourteen Poems by C.P.Cavafy. Seduced and bewitched, I have carried his life-loving aesthetic with me ever since: the exquisitely deft linear hand, the warm yet distanced portraits of beloved friends at leisure by L.A. swimming pools and in plush NYC apartments, the attention-grabbing color-palette provincial landscapes in so many media, from analog to digital; and that bemused, knowing, never-taking-himself-too-seriously gaze, peering at me from behind thick glasses while cradling a half-smoked cigarette,
Now, mere weeks after I experienced his final exhibition, David Hockney has passed.
Among his penetrant, witty dicta reverberating through my melancholy head as I write, this aperçu rises to the surface — “Artists, real artists, have to work. They can’t be hedonists. Really good painters are always working.”