LONDON (AP) – It’s not often an artist finds himself occupying 12 rooms of London’s leading museum of British art and the front page of populist tabloid The Sun. But David Hockney is unique.
For curators of a major retrospective opening this week at Tate Britain, the 79-year-old is an innovator whose 60-year career has taken in drawing, painting, printmaking, photography and digital drawing on smartphones and tablets. His depictions of sun-dappled Los Angeles swimming pools and the wooded English hills are among the best-known images in contemporary art.
For The Sun, he’s a great British icon. The newspaper invited Hockney to redesign its red masthead one day last week, boasting that this meant a “free Hockney for every reader.”
Hockney created cartoon-style sunrays and shadow, using a drawing app on his iPad.