Meaning

Hockney is describing a shift in his own thinking about how pictures work, one that brought him a greater sense of freedom. Moving toward a more conceptual approach means caring less about fixed rules of representation and more about what ideas and choices can produce. The freedom he mentions is the freedom that comes when you are no longer bound by a single way of seeing.

Context

This remark comes from a 2018 interview, when Hockney was in his eighties and working with iPad paintings and large-scale compositions with great energy. By that point he had spent decades questioning single-point perspective, exploring multiple viewpoints, and experimenting with photography and digital tools. His comment reflects a late-career confidence, a sense that accumulated thought and experiment had opened up new possibilities rather than narrowing them, which runs counter to the assumption that artists become more constrained as they age.

About the author

David Hockney is a British artist born in Yorkshire whose career has moved restlessly through painting, drawing, printmaking, stage design, photography, and digital art. He is celebrated for his ability to reinvent his practice repeatedly rather than settling into a fixed style. In his later decades he embraced the iPad as a drawing tool with the same enthusiasm he once brought to oil paint, and his continued productivity and conceptual ambition in old age have made him an unusual and inspiring figure in contemporary art.