David Hockney: A profile - Telegraph David Hockney, the 75-year-old artist who was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, broke into the British art scene in the Young Contemporaries exhibition at London's RBA galleries in 1961. Alongside artists including Patrick Caulfield, Allen Jones and Derek Boshier, his classmates from the Royal College of Art, Hockney was credited with marking the emergence of British pop art. Since then, Hockney's work has sat outside any one genre. A painter, draughtsman, printmaker and photographer, Hockney is known for his vibrant use of colour, evocative landscapes and portraits. After the Young Contemporaries exhibition, Hockney associated with designer Ossie Clarke, whom he would later depict in a double portrait with his wife, and Andy Warhol. His move to California in the mid-Sixties resulted in the 1967 paintings A Bigger Splash and A Lawn Being Sprinkled, which depicted water in an innovative way and paved the way for a series of images involving swimming pools. In 1971 Hockney's first retrospective opened at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, which later travelled to Paris. During the Seventies Hockney experimented more with photography and moved between New York, Paris and London, before he settled in California in 1982. The surrounding area, including the Grand Canyon, inspired a lot of Hockney's work, although in 1996 he returned to Yorkshire to paint family and friends, portraits which would be exhibited in the 1853 Gallery in Saltaire, Yorkshire. Hockney's most recent work has seen him return to Yorkshire to create vibrant landscapes of the North Yorkshire countryside. The artist blended paint with technology, sketches completed on an iPad and work recorded on video camera, in his 2012 show, David Hockney: A Bigger Picture at London's Royal Academy. The exhibition attracted more than half a million visitors, making it one of the Academy's most successful shows ever.