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![artist david hockney photographed by the los angeles times in two thousand and eighteen artist david hockney photographed by the los angeles times in two thousand and eighteen](https://cdn.aarp.net/content/dam/aarpe/en/home/entertainment/celebrities/info-2023/david-hockney-age-defier/_jcr_content/root/container_main/container_body_main/container_body1/container_body_cf/container_image/articlecontentfragment/cfimage.coreimg.50.932.jpeg/content/dam/aarp/entertainment/celebrities/2023/11/1140-david-hockney-with-paintings.jpg)
David Hockney is as busy and successful at 86 as any artist at any age. Consider this recent timeline:
- His latest ignition began when, nearing 80, he flew from his home in England to Los Angeles to create the bulk of a series of portraits on canvas that were brought together in the 2016 show, “David Hockney: 82 Portraits and 1 Still-Life,” to rave reviews.
- In 2018, his painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures) sold for $90.3 million, then the highest sale ever for a living artist.
- In 2019, he traveled to Normandy, France, to view the famed 230-foot-long medieval Bayeux Tapestry, which documents the Duke of Normandy’s conquest of England in 1066. Settling into his new home there just before the pandemic, Hockney began creating dozens of iPad paintings that document the changing seasons surrounding Hockney’s new house. The result, A Year in Normandie, first presented at Paris’ Musée de l’Orangerie in 2021, is a 295-foot-long mural of digitally connected individual iPad paintings.
- Around then, responding to the pandemic, he also created a large-scale digital animation of a sunrise that was presented around the world, including in New York’s Times Square and London’s Piccadilly Circus.
- He released the coauthored art book/memoir Spring Cannot Be Cancelled (2021), a “warm, inspiring report,” wrote one critic, on what Hockney had been up to in his early 80s.
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And he continues on. In February, Hockney collaborated on a major multimedia 50-minute-long immersive experience of his art — Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away) — that opened in London’s new Lightroom space. The experience features Hockney’s narration and new animations based in part on some of his many opera productions.
![a painting titled model with unfinished self portrait nineteen seventy seven oil on canvas by david hockney a painting titled model with unfinished self portrait nineteen seventy seven oil on canvas by david hockney](https://cdn.aarp.net/content/dam/aarpe/en/home/entertainment/celebrities/info-2023/david-hockney-age-defier/_jcr_content/root/container_main/container_body_main/container_body1/container_body_cf/body_one_cf_one/par2/articlecontentfragme/cfimage.coreimg.50.932.jpeg/content/dam/aarp/entertainment/celebrities/2023/11/1140x1134-david-hockney-model-with-unfinished.jpg)
Opening in November 2023 at London’s National Portrait Gallery is the much-anticipated “Drawing from Life” — a show of Hockney portraits that expands upon another that opened and closed after only 20 days due to the pandemic. The additions encompass more than 30 new portraits of friends (including me), family and acquaintances, all made in Hockney’s Normandy studio.
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