David Hockney’s Influence, in Three Artists’ Own Words
David Hockney’s death earlier this month has prompted a wave of reflection across the art world, but few tributes are as revealing as the ones coming from artists who absorbed his lessons into their own practice. Jordan Casteel, Jay Lynn Gomez, and Bryson Rand each describe a different Hockney: a painter of color and line, a chronicler of Los Angeles domesticity, and a touchstone for queer self-recognition.
Across a seven-decade career, Hockney built a body of work that was inseparable from place. His late-1960s and early-1970s images of Los Angeles captured sunlit pools and the private worlds of wealthy homes. He later turned to the Grand Canyon, East Yorkshire, and Normandy, while his portraits — especially his double portraits of couples — carried a rare mix of tenderness and tension.
For Casteel, Hockney’s lesson was formal and emotional at once. She said he taught her that color and line can communicate feeling as much as form, and that his portraits, landscapes, and scenes of daily life expanded how viewers understand the people within them. In her view, his work rendered those often misunderstood with dignity, intimacy, and joy.
Gomez traced her own work back to Hockney’s Los Angeles pictures, especially *A Bigger Splash*. After first encountering his art in high school through her mentor, Mr. Brockie, she later recognized the resemblance between the Hollywood Hills home where she worked as a live-in nanny and the houses in Hockney’s paintings. That connection helped shape her *Domestic Scenes* series. She eventually met Hockney in his Hollywood Hills home through Lawrence Weschler and said she will not forget his words, his jokes, or the way he suddenly rose from lunch to show her a Fra Angelico book.
Rand’s response was more explicitly tied to queer experience. While studying at the University of Colorado, he saw Hockney’s *A Rake’s Progress*, a series of 16 etchings from the early 1960s, and recognized something he had not yet seen so directly in art. He said the prints, which recount Hockney’s first trip to New York as a young man, were the first works he recalled seeing that spoke plainly to a gay experience. The series helped shape his thesis work and, he said, played a role in coming out to friends and family.
Taken together, the three reflections show how Hockney’s art continues to operate as more than a record of a singular career. It remains a living reference point for artists thinking about portraiture, landscape, desire, and the act of looking itself.
