Displaying items by tag: David Hockney

Amid competing efforts to cheer up Britain, the great pageants of the Olympics and the Queen's diamond jubilee might just have to make way for a new, unlikely contender in the race to restore our elusive feelgood factor.

On Saturday the doors to the much-publicised David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts opened to the public and, from the reaction of those the Observer spoke to, it could prove to be the most successful yet in a run of gallery blockbusters of work by artists that have included Paul Gaugin and Leonardo da Vinci. With advance tickets sold out until March, the exhibition could beat the Royal Academy's previous record-breaker, last year's The Real Van Gogh.

"Its strength is its sheer exuberance, the richness and the colours, on a rather dreary January day it makes you feel so optimistic," said Jim Bruce, an artist from London, emerging from the glass exit doors of the Hockney rooms. "It is the first glimmer of hope I have had this year when everything is so bleak. It lifts one's spirits. He has taken landscape to a whole new level, because it's abstract yet you could go to these places he is painting and recognise them."

His wife, who did not want to be named, agreed. "It makes you feel so happy. Really lifts the spirits. The video camera installation, with the clarity of the colours and the contrast between the scenes of winter and summer, is just delicious. There is a real stunned silence in that room, people are overawed."

Hong Kong students Amber Thavasa and Tan Cheng, both 22, adored the giant prints of Hockney's drawings on an iPad.

"I don't know how he could do that and I have tried," said Cheng. "It is very wonderful, very happy and not what we expected to find in English art galleries. It is not a great big intellectual effort, just beautiful and joyful."

The pair deliberate over what postcards of the works they want to buy, and take great handfuls to the busy tills. The gallery's shop is packed out with customers and assistants rushing out piles of fresh stock to replace the fast depleting piles of Hockney books and posters. Shelley Thompson, 45, from Ealing, London, is clutching a Hockney-inspired painting-by-numbers set for her 12-year-old son Keelan. "It's great, you never see these any more and he's keen to get painting after seeing all those colours in there!"

Has there ever been an artist quite as good at charming the public as David Hockney? Everyone knows the peroxide hair (now grey), the big glasses and the deep-voiced Yorkshire drollness. Hockney has touched the lives of millions of people who his arguably more talented contemporaries have never got near. He became the first British art star of the TV age – his easy-on-the-eye images and deadpan comments beamed into sitting rooms throughout the land – without appearing to do anything, except be himself.

An art world star when he was still a student at the Royal College of Art, he came rolling into the public consciousness on that great early Sixties wave of emancipated working-class talent that included the Beatles, Terence Stamp, David Bailey et al. And despite advancing years – he is 74 – and the fact that he has become a bit of a bore on the subject of smoking, a degree of youthful freshness and irreverence remain part of his image.

But now, having never quite shaken off his characterisation as the golden boy of British art, he appears to be the prime candidate for an even more major and potentially onerous role. With the death of Lucian Freud, Hockney is the only serious contender for the position of Britain’s greatest living artist. Eminent old stagers such as Sir Anthony Caro and Sir Howard Hodgkin feel too serious and too elitist; Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin too young and too polarising. But does he deserve it? Do the concept of greatness and the Hockney phenomenon really go together?

When Hockney, son of a Bradford accountant, came out as gay, while still a student in 1961, he was breaking through a lot more than the massive barrier of prohibition and disapproval that surrounded homosexuality. His acknowledgement of an identity that was then still illegal seems to have given him the confidence to do and say exactly what he liked, not only with family and friends, but to the media, whose attention he was adept at capturing even before he left college.

The prevailing trend in cutting-edge art was then American Abstract Expressionism, the high grandeur of Pollock and Rothko. Hockney and his Pop Art contemporaries deflated this painterly pomposity by incorporating throwaway popular imagery. But where American Pop was hard, sharp and inscrutable – think Warhol’s Marilyns – the British variant, exemplified by Hockney and Peter Blake, was more whimsical and personal.