David Hockney obituary: A genius in practically every medium - BBC

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".

- Tributes paid to a 'giant' and 'true icon' of British art

- In pictures: Swimming pools, changing seasons and Harry Styles

David Hockney was born on 9 July 1937.

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 poet, Walt Whitman.

It forced the spectator to confront the interests and sexual fantasies of the artist. It was Hockney reaching for the person he yearned to become.

He was the college's star student but still gloriously pig-headed. David refused to write the one essay required to graduate, and so failed his finals.

The resulting outcry forced the Royal College to back down.

It gave him his degree and even awarded him its prestigious Gold Medal. Hockney wore a gold lamé jacket at the ceremony, under the traditional academic gown.

Newspapers were launching glossy weekend magazines, turning pop stars and artists into an new breed of classless celebrity.

The Sunday Times showed David hanging out with Andy Warhol.

But - despite his newfound fame - Hockney quit the dreariness of post-war England in search of Paradise.

In 1964, he flew to Los Angeles - looking for the perfect light and bronzed torsos he'd seen in American male magazines.

As they landed, he saw hundreds of swimming pools glittering in the valleys below him. They promised a carefree existence of affluence, leisure and sexual freedom.

Britain had only just abandoned rationing; in California, swimming pools weren't luxuries - just a way of life.

Hockney was entranced. He ditched his British oil paints in favour of bright, Californian acrylics but retained his Bradford accent - which the Americans adored.

He was sexually promiscuous for the first, and probably only, time in his life and - inspired by an advert on TV - dyed his hair bright white.

Hockney painted the buildings he saw around him: determined to do for Los Angeles what Piranesi had done for Rome.

And the swimming pools themselves - with glorious weather and naked male bodies - became Hockney's most famous theme.