David Hockney is considered one of the greatest living painters. A 1960s exponent of British Pop Art, he’s also known for his figurative experimentation through the use of Polaroid, fax, iPhone e iPad. Randall Wright’s film is a portrait of the English artist in conformist 1960s America who spoke of his own homosexuality through his highly personal and disruptive work. After having moved to Los Angeles, at the height of the Pop period, Hockney began a quick, overwhelming rise with his large paintings, now highly sought-after, of houses and swimming pools populated by portraits drawn from life of people within his circle of friends. Through the artist’s own testimony and interviews with his friends and collaborators, including Arthur Lambert, Celia Birtwell and Ed Ruscha, the director builds a film which winds through period footage and an exclusive tour of the artist’s personal archive, between Los Angeles and his Yorkshire studio. where he still paints.  

 

 

Lives and works in London. He has directed documentaries, including Lucian Freud: Painted Life (2012) for which he was nominated for the Grierson Award and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA). He met Hockney while directing Shock of the Old (2000), a BBC Omnibus film about great artists who draw inspiration from the works in the National Gallery in London. He made the film Secret Knowledge (2002), which confirms a theory promulgated by Hockney: that the use of certain optical instruments by painters such as Vermeer and Caravaggio anticipated the invention of photography by almost a century.