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Artists and creatives pay tribute to one of Bradford’s most famous sons.
Justin Myers says he is old enough to remember when David Hockney designed the front cover of the Bradford phone book. The author was 13-years-old at the time when the telephone directory for the West Yorkshire city that birthed them both, landed on his doorstep. “This also means I am old enough to know what a phone book is, which makes that part of my life feel like a prologue in a period drama,” he tells me today. Printed in 1989, the cover designed by one of Bradford’s most famous sons bound together at least 100,000 telephone numbers. Yet there was, as Myers puts it, a furore of a reaction to the directory’s cover.
“The charming portrayal of Bradford’s landmarks – hills, mills, and City Hall – drew criticism from those whose favourite artworks did all the explaining for them, perhaps expecting something more realistic, or refined,” describes Myers. “Brush strokes suggested the sweeping hills that loom over the cluttered terraces and well-to-do cul-de-sacs.” Climbing up the steep valley sides between the City Hall and rows of terrace houses was a blue double-decker trolleybus that Hockney had painted; this too came under scrutiny. “The buses had long turned from blue to red to a kind of bilious yellow and green,” explains Myers, adding that it was “denounced as reeking of someone who hadn’t bothered to check in on their hometown in a while.”
At the time of the phone book, the painter and photographer had travelled thousands of miles from his hometown to Los Angeles. Hockney was making a name for himself on the other side of the Atlantic, to the disdain of some from the Yorkshire valley. “Perhaps the reaction of many Bradfordians to the infamous phone book was born of conflicted feelings over Hockney’s escape to LA in the sixties,” says Myers. “They like to see you do well, so long as you don’t forget where you came from.”
Yet doing well is somewhat of an understatement when describing the works of David Hockney. Born in Bradford in 1937, Hockney is considered to be one of the most influential and defining figures in contemporary art. Best known for his portraiture, both of himself and those closest to him, as well as his series of paintings of swimming pools, the artist was one of the linchpins of the pop art movement of the sixties. His first self-portrait shows Hockney as a teenager, dressed in a bright blue coat, red scarf and yellow tie. The piece possibly gives a glimpse of both the artist’s iconic dress sense and his vibrant palette, which would follow him throughout his career.
Hockney attended Bradford School of Art, before studying at the prestigious Royal College of Art in London. Upon graduating in 1962, he was awarded the college’s gold medal in recognition of his mastery as a draughtsman and his innovative paintings. Hockney moved to Los Angeles in the early sixties, where he began producing highly evocative and iconic images of urban life, as well as his depictions of queer men. “David Hockney has to be the most significant queer artist of recent times,” says writer and curator Gemma Rolls-Bentley, who was born and raised in South Yorkshire. “What makes him so unique is that he reached a massive level of global fame, truly becoming a household name, while being completely and explicitly queer in his art.”
Even before the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales, Hockney was producing prints of two men in bed together, such as his C.P. Cavafy etchings. “He said at the time that he was openly defending his way of life, simply painting his own reality,” explains Rolls-Bentley. Hockney moved to Los Angeles five years before New York’s Stonewall Inn uprising, which is now regarded as the catalyst for the contemporary western Pride movement. His positive depictions of queer life, at a time of oppression, were in Myers’s view quiet and unapologetic acts of rebellion. “Men swimming, men showering, men embracing, men just sitting quietly with their partners or their friends. Queer men happily going about their business, some long before it was legal, never mind socially acceptable, to have openly gay relationships.”
Hockney’s portrayal of queer life as something that resisted the tropes of tragedy or scandal is something that Conor Collins, a visual artist from Manchester, points to when he thinks of the artist’s impact on queer representation today. “Hockney’s contribution to queer representation was radical, precisely because it often appeared so unradical,” remarks Collins. “Before many people had language for visibility, Hockney was quietly placing queer love, desire and companionship into the cultural landscape. He painted the world as he experienced it and, in doing so, expanded that world for everyone else.”
Collins also denotes that Hockney brought queer people to life through his work. “There is a tenderness in his work,” he adds. “His figures are not symbols, but people. That may sound obvious, but for generations of queer people it was revolutionary to see themselves depicted not as problems to be solved, but as human beings entitled to beauty, leisure, intimacy and joy.”
There is a celebratory feel to Hockney’s art, echoes Rolls-Bentley, referencing the artist’s sun-drenched scenes of LA pools and sexy men in shorts. Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) is arguably one of Hockney’s most recognisable paintings, featuring an underwater swimmer in a pool and a clothed onlooker. These Los Angeles pools can be found in several of Hockney’s early work in California, a place where he found freedom as a gay man. “But he didn’t just paint the fantasy,” she remarks. “He captured the actual intricacies of queer life too, from the brutal breakups and utterly mundane domestic moments to the visual coding we sometimes had to rely on.”
Hockney’s swimming pools basking in the Californian sun come to mind when multi-disciplinary artist Kadir Karababa recalls the time he began to discover his own sexuality. “Hockney’s earlier pool paintings depicting nude male swimmers would thrill and excite me differently, as I realised my own burgeoning queerness.” A few days before Hockney died, Karababa’s 9-year-old niece announced to his sister that Hockney was her favourite artist. He was a similar age when he discovered the artist himself.
Born into a British-Turkish household in London, Karababa tells me that school trips often afforded him access to some of the best museums and galleries in the world. It was during one such school outing that he came across A Bigger Splash at the Tate. “What enthralled me was the same thing that enthrals others who love this most famous of Hockney’s works – and Hockney himself when he arrived in California,” reflects Karababa, who says that he is grateful for these school trips, given that his family were not taking him to such cultural spaces. “The bright bold colours, the exotic glamour of the architecture, palm trees and private swimming pool, all hinting at a life I couldn’t imagine living, growing up in concrete grey, inner London social housing.”
Whilst the Bradford phone book that Myers remembers vividly was a world away from men bathing in Los Angeles, it was in his opinion an introduction to the idea of art as controversial and divisive. “As subversions go, Hockney’s Bradford sketch wasn’t exactly punk or cubism, but it was provocative enough to make me question the majority opinion, something I’ve done reflexively ever since,” he says.
Hockney’s approach to art and life with a sense of curiosity and authenticity is what County Durham raised painter Vanessa Raw thinks of when I ask her about the late artists. “Although my work isn’t explicitly about queer identity, I’ve always felt a strong affinity with Hockney’s openness and generosity and the fact that he was a fellow northerner,” she replies, having been inspired by the notion that Hockney did not separate his life from his art. “His paintings quietly made space for intimacy, tenderness and different ways of seeing the world, without feeling the need to explain or justify themselves. That gave me confidence to trust my own instincts and to make paintings that explore connection, vulnerability and transformation in a way that feels true to me.”
Fellow artist Karababa also describes this sense of confidence thanks to the works of Hockney. Having come from a working class, migrant family, he laments that the financial pressures of these intersectional identities forced him to abandon his dreams of being an artist. “When I eventually found my way back to it in 2021, I picked up a paintbrush for the first time since childhood. Looking back at those early forays I can clearly see inspiration from his work – not cogent to me at the time.”
As Hockney’s work began to evolve away from his Yorkshire roots, so too did his own personal style. The artist’s mop of dark brown hair turned peroxide, after he saw an advert that said blondes had more fun, and his wardrobe began to fill up with colourful pieces that would eventually prick the imagination of the fashion industry. Iconic names, such as Yves Saint Laurent, Michael Kors, Osman and Kym Ellery, have all been influenced by the bright saturated colours that bleed between Hockney’s wardrobe and his canvases.
Closer to home, British designers Sir Paul Smith and Christopher Bailey have both designed collections around Hockney’s strong sense of style. Born in Halifax, West Yorkshire, Bailey designed a collection that was inspired by Hockney during his time at British fashion house Burberry in 2013. “I get the same thrill seeing his work today as I did when I first discovered it as a kid in Yorkshire,” he told the Guardian in 2017, having grown up near the Salt Mills, home to one of the designer’s favourite Hockney permanent collections.
Myers also grew up a stone’s throw away from the Salt Mills, in one of Bradford’s satellite towns, Shipley. Once a textile mill that was built in 1853, today the Grade II Listed building and UNESCO World Heritage Site is home to art galleries and shopping outlets. Speaking of the building, Myers says it was “transformed from dark and satanic into a bright, cultural space in the 1980s by Hockney’s friend Jonathan Silver.”
Similarly to Bailey, Hockney’s style also caught Myers’s attention. There is a print of a photograph taken in Hockney’s studio for Vogue in 1968 by Cecil Beaton, which now hangs on the author’s living room wall. “Hockney is in a black slogan T, slim-fitting black trousers and filthy white plimsolls you might still find on the feet trooping round Brick Lane markets on a Sunday,” says Myers, as he describes the photograph. “He’s finishing off his portrait of gay writer Christopher Isherwood and partner Don Bachardy, pausing to turn to model Maudie James and his then-boyfriend Peter Schlesinger with a knowing smirk. Life imitates art, a cosy natural depiction of gay men coincidentally creating something subversive. Oh, to be invited into the picture for only a moment.”
Yet perhaps what is most noteworthy of Hockney’s fashion sense is that it transcended generations and fashion trends. “Hockney was a time traveller when it came to style,” believes Myers. “Any photo of him taken over his younger decades could be a contemporary shot lifted from social media.”
Having died in June 2026, aged 88, Hockney’s influence on culture will doubtless continue long after his passing. During the days following his death, tributes from across the world were shared for the late artist, including from King Charles and prime minister Keir Starmer. On social media, people began posting their favourite Hockey pieces, or creating new work inspired by him. One such Hockney inspired photograph was taken by the illustrator and graphic designer Ben White, who captured his boyfriend swimming in a pool during a holiday in Lake Garda, Italy – this image is featured on Vada‘s summer digital cover.
For the LGBTQ+ community, the artist will occupy a special place in our hearts. “His legacy is major,” says Rolls-Bentley, who highlights in her book Queer Art just how significant Hockney’s artwork is for the art world. Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) broke records in 2018 by becoming the highest-priced painting by a living artist to sell at auction. As Rolls-Bentley writes in her book, this demonstrated Hockney’s impact in the art world and on LGBTQ+ representation. She tells me, “He has done so much for queer representation and for art in general. He is an absolute hero of mine, and as a fellow Yorkshire queer, I’ve always been a total fan girl.”
Karababa brings up LGBTQ+ representation as well, when I ask him about Hockney’s legacy. “Hockney’s impact on queer artists and representation goes far beyond these compositional devices, materials and subject matter,” he replies. “He lived with a defiant integrity on his own terms, never giving a fuck about what others thought.”
Collins also agrees that Hockney leaves behind more than just his paintings. “Hockney belonged to a generation that lived through extraordinary social change, and his work became part of the visual record of that journey,” he says. “Future generations will not simply learn about queer history through Hockney’s paintings, they will feel it.” What’s more, it is Collins’s belief that Hockney taught us a different way of viewing the world, “He reminded us that paying attention to the world is not a passive act. It is a way of participating in it. And for that reason, I think David Hockney will continue to feel astonishingly alive long after his death.”
Hockney Inspired: a photograph inspired by David Hockney, captured by the illustrator and graphic designer Ben White of his boyfriend on holiday in Italy, features on Vada’s summer 2026 digital cover.
