Britain says "Happy Birthday" to an old painter called David Hockney

David Hockney is 74 years old today. Things you possibly didn't know about David, that he :

* was born in Bradford and after leaving school, studied at the Royal College of Art in London.

* was featured in an exhibition called 'Young Contemporaries' which announced the arrival of British Pop Art.

* visited New York in 1963 and made contact with Andy Warhol and a later visit to California, where he lived for many years and was inspired to make a series of paintings of swimming pools in Los Angeles, using the comparatively new acrylic medium and in a highly realistic style using vibrant colours.

* in 1974, the subject of Jack Hazan's film, 'A Bigger Splash' named after one of Hockney's swimming pool paintings from 1967.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gErL4SqVEVw

* in 1998, saw his 'A Bigger Grand Canyon', a series of 60 paintings that combined to produce one enormous picture, bought by the National Gallery of Australia for $4.6million and a few years later 'The Splash' fetch £2.6 million.


* was born with the condition, 'synesthesia' and sees synesthetic colours to musical stimuli and in his construction of stage sets for ballets and operas, bases the background colours and lighting upon his own seen colours while listening to the music of the theatre piece on which he is working.

* spoke about a painting he did of his father in 1955.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnL3AZQuBng

and below are his paintings of :

Mr and Mrs Clark Percy
My Parents
A Bigger Splash