Meaning

Hockney is pushing back against a label he finds reductive. Calling himself merely a landscape painter, in his view, flattens the ambition and variety of his life's work. He wants viewers to understand that his art is about perception, representation, and ways of seeing, not simply about recording the countryside or the hills of Yorkshire.

Context

By the time Hockney made remarks along these lines in interviews during the 2000s, he had already moved through multiple distinct phases: early Pop Art canvases, swimming pool paintings, photographic collages he called joiners, and opera stage designs. The landscape work that came to dominate his later output was genuinely important to him, but he resisted the idea that it defined the whole of who he was as an artist. The comment reflects a broader frustration artists often feel when a single recognizable body of work overshadows everything else they have produced.

About the author

David Hockney, born in Bradford, England in 1937, is one of the most celebrated and widely discussed British artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He studied at the Royal College of Art in London and later spent long periods living and working in Los Angeles, where his iconic pool paintings were made. Known for restless curiosity about how images are constructed, he has worked across painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, and digital media throughout a career spanning more than six decades.