David Hockney

David Hockney was born on the 9th of July 1937; he is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer, who lives in Bridlington, Yorkshire, although also maintaining a base in London. The pop art movement in 1960s mainly knows him for his contributions; he is considered to be one of the most influential British artists of the twentieth century.

David Hockney has worked with photography, or to be more precise, photo collage. Using varying numbers of small Polaroid snaps or photo lab-prints of a single subject. Hockney would arrange a patchwork to make a composite image. Because these photographs are taken from different perspectives and at slightly different times, the resulting image has an affinity with cubism, this one of Hockney’s aims discussing the way human vision work. Other work was landscapes such as the Pearblossom Highway and also portraits like kasmin.

Hockney created these photomontage works mostly between 1970 and 1986. He referred to them as “joiners”. He began a style of art by taking Polaroid photographs of one subject and arranging them into a grid layout. The subject would actually move while being photographed so the movement would be shown from the photographer’s perspective. In later works Hockney changed his technique and moved the camera around the subject instead.