David Hockney
Painter
Britain’s greatest living painter and lifelong technology adopter — Polaroids, fax machines, iPads — debuted his first AI-assisted artwork on Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage in 2023, at age 85.
In his words
It’s been one hundred years since perspective was last discussed, with Cubism. I suppose now that things are being generated by robots, we have to look even closer with entirely fresh eyes.
There was great advantage in this medium because it’s backlit and I could draw in the dark. I didn’t ever have to get out of bed.
Biography
David Hockney (born 1937 in Bradford) is widely regarded as Britain’s greatest living painter — the pop-era chronicler of Los Angeles swimming pools whose Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) set the auction record for a living artist in 2018. He is also art history’s most relentless technology adopter: Polaroid composites, fax-machine art, Quantel Paintbox television drawings, and, from 2010, hundreds of iPad paintings exhibited in major museums.
A robot on the Pyramid Stage
In June 2023, at 85, Hockney debuted his first AI-assisted work: I lived in Bohemia, Bohemia is a Tolerant Place, a one-minute moving-image piece commissioned by the digital art platform CIRCA and premiered on Glastonbury Festival’s Pyramid Stage screens before Elton John’s headline set. Using AI, Hockney removed the figures from his 2014 painting series The Dancers, letting the emptied landscape shimmer for one of the largest audiences any digital artwork has had.
Hockney treats AI as he treated every prior tool — a fresh way of seeing rather than a threat to painting. He framed machine generation as a reason for humans to look harder, comparing the moment to Cubism’s upheaval of perspective a century earlier. His sixty-year argument that new media expand rather than diminish drawing has made him a touchstone for artists who see AI as simply the newest brush.
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Sources & further reading
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