#my hero academi illegals

[frickingnerd]

number 6's with a darling who's a yandere for him

pairing: number 6 / rokuro nomura x gn!reader

tags: yandere!six x yandere!reader, unhealthy obsession (mutual), stalking (mutual), two freaks dating each other

a/n: nobody gets this man like i do. he's my little unhinged freak and i love him dearly <3

number 6 never introduced himself to you in his original form, worrying you might be grossed out by who he really is, so he was always just rokuro nomura with you!

he won your heart over as rokuro and it didn't take long until the two of you began to date

during his time with you, number 6 always made sure not to show how obsessed he was with you, keeping up the act of being the normal rokuro nomura!

but you had soon realized that this wasn't him. that this was just a persona he put on around you and that he was hiding his true self!

how did you find out about it? well, you tried to do some research about your boyfriend, only to find out that rokuro nomura wasn't real. but you wanted to know the man behind that persona!

and so, you began to dive further into his past. you wanted to know everything about the man you loved! no matter how ugly it might be, you'd still love him!

when number 6 found out that you were looking through his past, he panicked. he was worried you'd hate him if you found our about it and he angrily confronted you, telling you to either trust him and stop or leave him!

but that's when you dropped your act, telling him just how badly you wanted to see all there is about him. even the ugly parts about his life were lovable to you! nobody else but you could love him like that and you needed him to understand it!

for a moment, number 6 was freaked out. how could he not, if he learned how obsessive his darling was. but then again, so was he. he had stalked you as well, scooping through your past. you were just the same…

with you finally dropping the act and revealing that you were a yandere for him, number 6 did the same! and while anyone else would be freaked out about such a revelation, the two of you were as happy as you could possibly be, knowing you were both as obsessed with the other one as they were with you…

[foxyanghole]

Coming soon.(I really wait all Kazuho's songs in anime)

[frostgears]

We Who Serve

"Lookin' good, Coda! Got something for ya," the student mage said, rolling the shimmering violet soul gem between her fingers.

"Heya, Bree," the artificer grunted. "You look, as always, like a teenage delinquent who styles her own hair using alchemical process runoff."

"Well, I'm hardly going to wear an Academy uniform down to this end of the artificers' quarter. And I don't give you shit for wearing the same reagent-spattered leather apron every time I see you."

"It's shop gear, sweetheart. Some of us have to work for a living. And I see your gem, but it better not have a dream-junkie soul in it this time," Coda grouched. "Remember your last bright idea? Remember the one that was convinced she was still dreaming? Remember the repair work when she tried to fly? Turns out a service compulsion built right into your corporeal form doesn't do jack if your mind is so scrambled that you think you're asleep."

"Dream-junkies usually die alone and unremembered, Coda. And nobody, I mean nobody, cares about them once they start using heavily. I'm practically saving lives, right?"

"Sure. Saving lives. So where's this one from?"

"You really wanna know? Thought you promised me not to ask where the souls come from, when we started doing this thing together."

"Bree. I don't want another attempted flight on my hands. Especially not off a balcony and into the middle of the owner's gala for his daughter's debut. Lost a big client there and had to eat the repair bills. No good, get me? Another like that and we're through."

"And you'd get animating souls for your dolls from where, then? But no worries. No worries at all. This one's from far away, and guaranteed worth the juice it took to bring them here." Bree's smug smile suggested repair bills would be the least of anyone's worries this time around.

"How far away?"

"The other side of a summoning circle."

"Bullshit." The artificer folded her powerful gloved arms across her chest. "You told me you looked into that, and it'd take a dozen mages as powerful as your dean to even try."

"Oh, I didn't do the summoning. Someone else did. You see, I just happen to be in the top twelve of my class…"

Coda raised an eyebrow. "You?"

Bree pouted. It was a good pout, a practiced pout; it had been the undoing of several of her classmates. "Do I not look it?"

"Academy uniform or dancehall grunge, I can't imagine you studying; that's the real fork in the mind's eye."

"I do study! I just… study best when I've got something I want to study, that's all! Anyway. So. Here I am, right? Top twelve in my class. Invited to see, for my education, a ritual that takes place at most once a decade: the Calling of a Chosen Hero."

"That time again already?"

"Evil never rests, or so they say. Anyway, it was very impressive. The best archmages in the Kingdom chanting up a hullabaloo around this huge summoning circle carved into a slab of obsidian. Candles. Incense. Wardlights glowing like a solstice tree. And they literally reach outside the boundaries of this world, Coda, and pull a soul from another one. Very heavy shit, very potently executed. Except just as they've got the soul on this side of the boundaries so they can start building a body for them, Archmage Eldreid has a stroke."

"Well, that can't be good."

"Wasn't great. Ritual falls right the fuck apart. The slab shatters and the circle with it. For a moment the combined light of the wardflames is like a stained-glass sun, but I can see the summoned soul glittering naked in the chaos, and, well," she paused and ran her fingers through her multicolored hair, "I keep my soulcatcher on me at all times because it's illegal as hell, right? Can't leave it lying around the dorms. So, me, soulcatcher, soul… my reflexes kinda took over. Next thing I knew, the docents are rushing all us students out of the room so they can get a healer and a fire crew in there."

"Bree, what the fuck is wrong with you?"

"So here's the final thing," she said, ignoring Coda. "I inquired, as soon as possible, as any nervous teacher's pet would, after the health of Archmage Eldreid and the fate of the Hero. Eldreid's gonna be fine in a few weeks. And the conclusion of the other archmages, or at least the one that could be bothered to talk to us, is that 'the Hero's soul simply returned to its own world', and that they'll have to try the ritual again in a month. Which means I have the soul of a Chosen Hero in my hand, and it's untraceable, Coda. Missing and not from this world. You've heard of what they do. Just imagine how good your next doll is going to be."

The artificer took a moment to process this. Then she nodded. "You're mental. But lucky. Happens I've been working on something special. Have a look with me, Bree."

Coda proudly uncovered a draped figure at the far end of the workshop. The doll glistened, caressed by even the fading afternoon light. Its skin was fine white matte porcelain, its many joints glistening darkly iridescent metal barely visible behind ceramic limbs, and its shape a figure of idealized human perfection that any sculptor would have been proud of. Soft cotton ropes in contrasting black wrapped every limb in complex twisted bindings.

Bree whistled. "Wow."

"A cut above the ones you've seen so far, right?"

"It's gorgeous. If it was ensouled right now, I'd be asking if she was single." The student mage bit her lip. "Wait, why's it all tied up so prettily? Coda, you absolute alleycat, is she not single?"

"Gods, the imagination on you, girl. The ropes are just to hold everything in place on the stand during assembly and storage."

"Is it done?"

"Frame was finished weeks ago, shell last week, but the cosmetic detail work took forever. I attached the last of the hair this morning, installed the eyes — so, yes, I suppose it's done."

"Then let's make it go!"

"Eager to get paid, Bree?"

"No. Well. Yes. Academy studies aren't cheap even on a scholarship. But you showed me this wonder, and now I am entirely believing my own bullshit. You're a godsdamned artist. This soul has to go in this doll, Coda. It's too perfect."

"You get the money on successful ensoulment. As always."

"Tch!"

Bree carefully marked a diagram for ensoulment on the floor, enclosing herself and the stand, then, chanting lines in a guttural voice almost entirely unlike her usual, reached around behind the doll's neck to press the soul gem into a hidden receptacle there. The diagram flared into life, a curtain of green sparks drifting upwards from the shop floor and then vanishing in directions named only by mages.

"—y'glacht nissat ephed, be thou whole and one with yourself, itisc, drah, nyen."

A shiver passed through the doll.

Clearing her throat, the mage said, "It's done," and carefully scuffed the diagram with the toe of her shoe.

It was then that the door exploded, and a blazing silver radiance filled the workshop.

"What the fu—"

"JUSTICE."

Bree and Coda could barely make out the general shape of a skeleton, winged, within a halo of silver light.

It awoke to a very loud voice, a bright light, and a body that couldn't move.

"—CRIME THAT CANNOT BE UNDONE, YET FITTING PUNISHMENT HAS BEEN FOUND FOR BOTH."

Sleep paralysis again? Can I make something move anyway? It tried to flex, found immediate resistance everywhere.

"THE ARTISAN HAS SOILED HER HANDS WITH STOLEN SOULS, BUT THOSE THAT HAVE BEEN STOLEN WALK IN HER BODIES, AND THOSE MUST BE CARED FOR. THE ARTISAN IS BOUND FOR THE TIME BEING TO CREATE NO MORE BODIES BUT ONE, AND ONLY TO SERVICE HER CREATIONS TO THE BEST OF HER ABILITIES AND AT HER OWN EXPENSE. LET HER ATONEMENT BEGIN THUS."

Silver sparks flared from the left. Someone screamed.

"THE MAGE HAS STOLEN SOULS, AN EVEN GREATER TRANSGRESSION. LET HER EXPERIENCE WHAT IT IS LIKE TO BE SEVERED FROM MORTAL FLESH AND BOUND TO HER ACCOMPLICE'S WORK. HER FLESH SHALL BE HELD RANSOM, AND HER TASK FOR THE TIME BEING SHALL BE TO SAFEGUARD AND PROTECT HER MOST RECENT VICTIM, UNTIL AND UNLESS SAID VICTIM MAY RELEASE HER FROM SERVICE, SATISFIED. LET HER ATONEMENT BEGIN THUS."

More sparks. A ripping sound, a brief shock in the air as if a taut string had snapped.

Then a hand under its chin, a face that was no face, only shining bones, and a voice that reverberated inside it.

"THIS IS NOT A NIGHTMARE, UNWILLING TRAVELER. WE REGRET THAT YOU CANNOT GO HOME. THE SKEIN OF DESTINY IS TANGLED, BUT JUSTICE MAY YET BE DONE HERE. YOU WILL BE WATCHED. GOOD LUCK TO YOU."

Then the silver light was gone.

It still couldn't move.

Later, it heard the sound of bitter laughter. A woman with close-cropped hair wearing shop leathers held a shimmering violet gem in one hand, a scroll and a carved stick in the other. She waved the objects in front of it. "Look what's become of my business partner," she told it. "She'll need a body soon. Like yours, I think. Bree liked yours. You'll help me. You don't have a choice, by the way."

She busied herself with its restraints. When a critical knot was loosened, it suddenly collapsed to the ground. It should have hurt; it didn't. It stood up, taking a proffered hand from the woman in shop leathers.

"Hmm. We should get some clothes on you. Should be a uniform your size in that box over there. Mirror on the left."

It opened the box, held up frilly black and white pieces of cloth, some vaguely recognized.

A dress? But… I'm…

It looked down on unfamiliar curves rendered in ceramic and metal, and collapsed again.

A hand hauled it back to woozy verticality.

"You'll get used to that body soon. Just stand, I guess. I'll put it on you." Hands brushed its side. Fabric dropped over its head and into a snug fit. Ties were tied.

"Better. Mirror."

It walked, slowly but more steady with each step, to the mirror.

A doll looked back at it, wearing the tight-fitting dress and apron of a maid.

It spoke, and its own voice sounded strangely musical to it: "Who am I?"

"Do they not have names where you come from?"

"I don't remember mine."

"Hmm. I'll call you after your design, then. Your name, doll, will be Lyric."

"Lyric."

"Coda," the woman said, indicating herself with a thumb.

It curtsied, feeling that this was somehow the thing to do, and then asked, "Doll?"

"Yep. But like I said, you'll get used to it. Welcome to Coda's." She sighed. "You can start by sweeping up what's left of the door."

It would have time to wonder later why sweeping felt like the right thing to do. Why obeying felt like the right thing to do. How "JUSTICE MAY YET BE DONE HERE" had anything to do with chores. But for now, it had the broom. Now was fine. It could stay in now. So it did. □ --- next: We Who Will Not Bow

[mcd-brainrot-hours]

The Divine Warriors p.1

howdy here’s a post about the divine warriors in my rewrite. this is more of the religious aspect of them. part 2 will be more about them personally. feel free to ask questions!

Irene is the matron of healing, fertility, love, faith, rebirth, and life.

Shad is a symbol of death, decay, plague, destruction, and suffering.

Esmund is the deity of strength, protection, weath, stone, commerce, and smithing.

Kul’zak is the deity of stars, travels, land, weather, music, luck, and storytelling (along with enki).

Menphia is the deity of women, justice, wrath, fury, freedom, choice, and meifwas.

Enki is the deity of knowledge, truth and deceit, storytelling (along with Kul’zak), outcasts, and medicine.

The divine are worshiped in different ways by different people.

-Irene is worshiped by religious folk (mainly in ru’an) and people in the medical field. Really, everyone worships Irene in some way. They typically say a prayer while kneeling, heads bowed with their hands cupped towards the sky (there’s a belief that the rain is the matron’s tears, no one knows why she weeps though). Sometimes, religious extremists will willingly mutilate themselves to be “perfect” in the eyes of the matron. People pray to irene for blessing in fertility, love, life, and whenever they are struggling. She is the most commonly prayed to.

-There are still some mortals who still worship Shad despite it being illegal. When they pray to him, they often do so while kneeling on hot coals. if they are caught worshiping him, they will be promptly executed for their act of treason.

-Esmund is worshiped by guards for strength and people of power during wartime for protection as a graduation ritual, graduates of the guard academy will pray to Esmund while holding a piece of jewelry that is sentimental to them (something that belonged to either a mother or a lover) and they get a symbolic tattoo (idk what yet).

-Enki is worshiped by scholars. They often leave things related to knowledge behind after they pray to Enki (college students joke about leaving blood offerings to enki so they can pass their exams). schools and certain libraries will have shrines dedicated to Enki.

-Kul’zak is worshiped by travellers. They often pray before they leave for their travels and leave offerings to Kul’zak at every stop of their journey. Kul’zak’s followers build him little shrines at certain stops. Those shrines act as guides for fellow wanderers.

-Menphia is mostly worshipped by women and is seen as a symbol of justice amongst them. There's an old legend that once Menphia killed her own father to protect her younger sisters. Many women look up to her as a symbol of strength. women who are caught in abusive relationships will pray to her for the strength to escape. Meifwa in Tu’la will pray to her for safety from the king.

Many churches dedicated to the matron will have stained glass depictions of each of the divine warriors. They are each shown with a halo of light, portraying them as saints. In churches that date back to the divines’ time, there used to be one of Shad. Those were all destroyed, though.

There used to be churches dedicated to Shad but those were all destroyed. Rumor has it there is still one remaining. Nobody has found it.

There are smaller churches through out the specific region each divine warrior is from (except Kul’zak, nobody knows where they came from).

Tu’la has churches dedicated to Menphia and Gal’ruk has one dedicated to Enki (it’s more of a library than a church).

Churches that are dedicated to Irene will also teach about the other divine (mostly Esmund- especially in O’khasis).

The most commonly accepted and preached story of the divine warriors is that Shad was the villian and the rest were the heroes (more on that later >:3 ).

Everybody paints the divine warriors (especially Irene) in such a holy light where they do no wrong (minus Shad).

Little does the world know, the Church went on a little spree and burnt every single book (that they could find) that contained information that opposed what they believed about Irene. But they didn’t find all of them.

Maybe Irene isn’t as holy and pure as they thought.

Maybe the divine aren’t exactly as they seem.

:)

[tortured-writers-parttime-poets]

police izuku au

i dunno how i didnt think of this before bc i actually love reading fics of this au

this is gonna be a bit unorganized because its straight from my notes app but oh well

-izuku being one of the youngest graduates of the police academy/helping out so much at the station that they just go 'fuck it' abd give him a license

-IZUKU WITH GUNS !!!

-he also does part time detective work because his analysis is unmatched

-he has degrees in psychology, criminology, social work, and he's a licensed EMT + his detective/police shit

-everyone knows him in the station, and so do heroes that frequent there like eraserhead

-hes basically naomasa's son

-he has coffee+smoking addictions but hes stoll the sunshine boy of the police

-though once or twice they've seen him get real mad on the field and the officers that witnessed it are vaguely terrified of him

-but he's still baby

-martial arts !!!! his local dojo is his third home, only behind the station and his shitty but cozy apartment. 

-he's been doing minor detective work since he was fourteen, at fic time he's like 16 and also managed to stop the war by predicting attacks and arresting/saving and rehabilitating the league and shooting afo through the head.

-the hero students know of and have seen him at this point but havent spoken to him

-they just kind of see him popping up everywhere and hanging around crime scenes and periodically annoying tsukauchi and eraser because he's a chaotic neutral gremlin

-he would be chaotic lawful but he's only lawful where the law can see

-He should have never met nedzu.

-he's chaotic neutral because while he is technically a Good Guy, he does chaotic (illegal)shit when he wants where he wants because he wants to and has no survival instincts

-he's lowkey kind of depressed/suicidal

-hes also on anxiety meds which tend to ramp up the sucidal thoughts for some fucking reason

-so thats why he isnt a jittering ball of nerves, stuttering and other cringe shit

-also because he got that shit beat of out him like he's hella traumatized

-also kinda psychotic but its cool

-he laughed in bakugous face once

-legit looked down at him(cuz i made izu tall), smirked, snorted, and burst out laughibg while bakugou was threatening him.

-"id say im sorry but im not, its just hard to take you seriously when i have to crane my neck to look down at you-" then turned around and walked away towards the detective, still giggling

-bakugou was so stunned he didnt go after him.

-HE HAS A MULLET !!! ITS  NOT SUPER NOTICEABLE BUT ITS THERE

-he also has his ears pierced, 

-the earing on his left ear is one he had custom made from a piece of his jawbone he had to get removed after he got fucked up on the field one time

-its sick as fuck and he'll tell the story to whoever asks, its not a sensitive thing

-his jaw is a bit crooked too like u can see where the chunk is missing

-not super noticeable but still there

-he's like 6'2, so noticeably much taller than naomasa, but the detective still likes to ruffle his hair, even though he has to reach up now. 

-sometimes he looks at him and sighs, grumbling about how his son is all grown up now

-1A and 1B  are 2A and 2B at fic time, and simce the war never happened (for them), they are significantly less traumatized

-izuku however was at the frontlines when they went in for the final takedown of the league,

-so he's traumatized enough for all of them.

-he's covered in scars from knives, bullets, claws, SH, etc etc

-he's also ripped

-gotta be for the police work

-not like aizawa ripped but if he rolled up the sleeves on a button up and crossed his arms the seams of the shirt would be straining.

-one time he was in one of those tight sleeveless shirts that have bare hips (yk the ones whore) and he got called in so he didnt change and everyone got a good look at all the muscles and scars 

(//👁️////👁️//)

-the UA students were there too because he was called in (optionally) to help with training shit and he just didnt bother to change 

-they were simpin fr

-he's aroace tho <333 (projecting) 

-tsuki tossed him a double thigh holster 4 knives which made his baggy cargo pants a bit less baggy and a bit more *cough* defined (cue more student simping)

-he's completely unaware of the effect hes having on them btw

-and fingerless gloves with padded+built in brass knuckles!!! he already had those on tho

-hes just funky like that

[lesbianneopolitan]

Basics for the FFXIV AU for my Neo:

· Trivia Vanille was born in the Vanille family, a somewhat wealthy merchant family in La Noscea.

· Her father was Jimmy Vanille, who actually was up to his neck with debts with a group of pirates from the East. Ref to the Xiong family.

· Her mother was Carmel Vanille, actually trained to be a spy and assassin by another group of criminals from the East as well. Ref to The Spiders.

· Neo ends up living pretty sheltered, like in canon. Living in the abusive household with her ableist parents. She tries to sail to Lima Lominsa a few times to start making small crimes in hopes of catching their attention. Every time they end up paying off the stuff she stole to keep mouths shut.

· Eventually she starts a fire in the Vanille mansion, which makes her parents to send her off to an Academy that was settled in La Noscea. There she learns fencing, among the rest of her assassination skills. The Academy was obvs actually a cover for The Spiders in La Noscea.

· Neo meets with Roman at one point- an independent criminal, a pirate. He lives free, and while he was Neo's target for the Academy, she ends up befriending him.

· The plot is Roman Holiday but adapted to the surroundings of La Noscea, p much.

· Trivia ends up becoming Neopolitan. She makes it so the different pirate crews end up against each other at the Vanille mansion.

· She becomes a criminal alongside Roman after that, indulging in the kind of piracy and crimes that are, well, illegal.

· The Seventh Umbral Calamity replaces the Fall of Beacon. Roman dies in it, and Neo is left to wander on her own.

· The main WoL is, ideally, a version of Ruby Rose who ended up involved in all the main plots due to her kindness and being one of Hydaelyn's chosen.

· While Neo is still quite the anti-hero and has a sadistic side to her, she ends up joining Ruby and the Scions to help, initially against the Garlean Empire, but grows enough attached to want and stay around. She is a side character very much like the rest of Scions.

· Neo ends up becoming a Red Mage. She's also a mistress of glamours, replacing her shapeshifting in canon.

· She ended up staying around Il Mheg when ending in The First, of course she would end up with the fae-

· Later on once they're helping with the plot about the Void/The Thirteenth, Neo gets actually possessed by a voidsent in the form of a demonic cat. Ref to V9.

· The violent 'exorcising' is what eventually leaves her with the change of eyes and teeth, even if she was born a Keeper of the Moon Miqo'te.

· When left unattended, she commits small crimes and kills people that deserve it, but unless someone gets in her way, she only targets corrupted people that not many dare to touch.

· Because she doesn't like just standing around doing nothing, she tries to join the WoL in everything she can. Always up for an adventure or get into something exciting.

[demonitizedstuff]

My main three blorbi

Obligatory originally MHA OCS turned Epithet Erased

Also they are made physically using Picrews off the hot page abaabba

They are the OCS and some of them might be apart of one of my sister's projects?

(color who? Guarding who? 🤫🤔)

Aiko Hogo

Epithet: Mundie(?)

A highschooler who thinks she has an Epithet... At least we think? She can do stuff, but she's not sure.

Currently has a D in Math, somehow passing chemistry, which is 99% math???

Is currently stretching herself thin with like...20 different clubs, from Drama to Color Guard. She's ...not very popular.

She's a frequent customer to Blyndeff Toy Emporium, she apologizes frequently for getting in Molly's way (she never is), but she offers and hands over sweets and other baked goods (with notes that say "hands off, LINEBACKER!")

"It just takes a while! And many tries, the third doesn't always work. But you will get there!"

Ashton Kikai

Epithet: Machine

This Epithet allows for the user to extend machines from their body. Example being an Arm Cannon in the same vain as MegaMan or Samus. More examples could be some mech suits or powers like Generator Rex or Max Steel (niche I know but it's a good example)

Ashton is a member of Bliss Ocean, he despises Epithets as it makes things "too easy". He despises making complicated machines with his Epithet, only using basic tools and blasters to build better things and tear down things he despises.

(Originally in the OG universe I made him in, he's a hero lol, I'm trying to make this work REALLY hard)

"Why take years to build a machine to do something that some inscribed bozo can do automatically."

Pandora Kikai

Epithet: Conflagration

The user can expel flames that spread faster than normal, as if accelerated with kerosene or fuel. Strangely, the flames seem to do more damage to buildings than anything else. Brick, which normally stands in flame, brittles and crumbles.

Pandora was a former racer, an illegal street racer, along with strong strokes of underground fighting, who eventually decided her talents would be put to use in a better place, and with the help of Sweet Jazz PD Detective Reese Nakamura, goes through with the Police Academy, and becomes an officer and the main mechanic in the Sweet Jazz Police Department.

"I'm not a traitor, you're a traitor to yourself, you followed a path of crime and pain, I dug myself out of that path into the light."

AND THERE'S THE BIG THREE DONE!

YAAAAAAAAAAAA

[angels1fly]

Introduction post

Hello, my name is Lina (She/He), I‘m 16 and live in Germany.

Facts about me:

- I‘m an ISTP

- I’m a libra (Birthday: 26th of September)

- I‘ve been writing since I was about 10 years old

- I love anime, reading and sports

- I play volleyball

- I’m an editor

- I’m into reality shifting and will post about it

─────────── ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ─────────

Fandoms:

Anime:

- Haikyuu (2023)

- Jujutsu Kaisen (2023)

- My Hero Academia (2023)

- Bungou Stray Dogs (2023)

Shows and Movies:

- The Umbrella Academy (2021)

- The Walking Dead (2023)

- 13 Reasons Why (2019)

- Stranger Things (2021)

- The MCU (2020)

- Harry Potter (2020)

Singers:

- One Direction (+ Solo music)

- 5 Seconds of Summer

- Arctic Monkeys

- Chase Atlantic

- Melanie Martinez

- Seventeen

─────────── ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ─────────

Characters I will and won‘t write for:

- I‘ll most likely write for anyone as long as the character isn’t either pedophilic, a rapist or anything of the sort. I also won’t write for them when the character is under the age of 15.

I will also write for ships as long as they aren’t pro-ships. Any requests regarding illegal ships will be ignored, I’m not comfortable with that.

─────────── ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ─────────

Socials

- TikTok

- Instagram

- Pinterest

- Discord (@/angels.fly)

─────────── ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ─────────

DNI

- Transphobes and homophobes

- Racists

- Pro-shippers

- Pedophiles

- Under the age of 14

- RCTA

- Anti Shifters

[himejoshi-homosexual]

God I'm annoying as fuck, so glad I'm in the annoying as fuck website

Tagging System

— Misc .

mine

💌.asks, 🩷. preguntas

💌.txt, 🩷. texto

🗨.txt 💬.txt

💭. 🗯.

Original Art, Original Characters,

tags: 1

art tag,

fanart tag, fan-art tag, fan animation tag,

fan-fiction tag, fanfic tag, fic tag

cosplay tag, crafts tag,

analysis/meta tag, meta tag,

graphics tag,

tags: 2

au's tag, au tag, crossover tag, spoilers tag,

sister tag, bnha spoilers, bkdk tag,

— Fandoms .

TV Series: Anime & Manga

モブサイコ100, Mob Psycho 100, REIGEN,

ダンジョン飯, Dungeon Meshi, Delicious in Dungeon, dungeon meal, dungeon food, Tragones y Mazmorras, calabozos y tragones, delicioso en el calabozo

とんがり帽子のアトリエ, Witch Hat Atelier, Atelier of Witch Hat, El Taller de Sombreros de Mago, El Atelier de Sombreros de Mago,

僕のヒーローアカデミア, My Hero Academia, My Hero Academy, Mi Academia de Héroes,

My Hero Academia: Vigilantes, Vigilante - My Hero Academia: Illegals, Vigilante - Mi Academia de Héroes ILEGALES, ヴィジランテ -僕のヒーローアカデミア ILLEGALS,

My Hero Academia: Smash!!, 僕のヒーローアカデミア チームアップミッション,

My Hero Academia: Team-Up Missions, My Hero Academia: Misiones En Equipo,

僕のヒーローアカデミア, ヒーローリーグベースボール, My Hero Academia O.N.A: H.L.B. - Hero League Baseball,

My Hero Academia: Two Heroes, My Hero Academia: The Movie "Two Heroes", My Hero Academia: Dos Héroes, Mi Academia de Héroes: Dos Héroes, My Hero Academia: La Película "Dos Héroes", 僕のヒーローアカデミア THE MOVIE 〜2人の英雄〜,

My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising, My Hero Academia: The Movie "Heroes Rising", My Hero Academia: El Despertar De Los Héroes, Mi Academia de Héroes: El Despertar De Los Héroes, My Hero Academia: La Película "El Despertar De Los Héroes", 僕のヒーローアカデミア THE MOVIE ヒーローズ:ライジング,

My Hero Academia: World Heroes' Mission, My Hero Academia: The Movie "World Heroes' Mission", My Hero Academia: Misión Mundial De Héroes, Mi Academia de Héroes: Misión Mundial De Héroes, Mi Academia de Héroes: La Película "Misión Mundial De Héroes", のヒーローアカデミア：ワールドヒーローズミッション,

My Hero Academia: You're Next, My Hero Academia: The Movie "You're Next", 僕のヒーローアカデミア THE MOVIE ユア ネクスト,

My Hero Academia: One's Justice, My Hero Academia: School Briefs,

進撃の巨人, Attack on Titan, Ataque a los Titanes, Ataque de los Titanes,

「進撃の巨人」 The Final Season, Attack On Titan: The Final Season, Attack On Titan: Temporada Final,

Attack On Titan: The Final Chapters, Attack on Titan: No Regrets, Attack on Titan: Lost Girls, Attack On Titan: Junior High,

鬼滅の刃, Demon Slayer, Guardianes de la Noche,

鬼滅の刃, Demon Slayer, Guardianes de la Noche, 劇場版 鬼滅の刃 無限列車編, Demon Slayer – The Movie: Infinity Train, Guardianes de la Noche: Tren infinito,

鬼滅の刃, Demon Slayer, Guardianes de la Noche, 鬼滅の刃 刀鍛冶の里編, Demon Slayer: To the Swordsmith Village, Guardianes de la Noche: Rumbo a la Aldea de los Herreros,

鬼滅の刃, Demon Slayer, Guardianes de la Noche, 「鬼滅の刃」 刀鍛冶の里編, Demon Slayer: Swordsmith Village, Arco de La Aldea de los Herreros,

うずまき, Uzumaki, Espiral,

未来日記, Future's Diary, Diario del Futuro,

ハッピーシュガーライフ, Happy Sugar Life, Feliz Vida de Azúcar,

やがて君になる, Bloom Into You, Al final te convertirás en ti misma,

ワンパンマン, One Punch-Man,

ビースターズ, Beastars,

ハイキュー!!, Haikyū!!, Haikyuu!!,

ユーリ!!! on ICE, Yuri!!! on Ice, Yuri!!! Sobre Hielo,

スパイファミリー, Spy × Family, SPY×FAMILY, SPY FAMILY,

映像研には手を出すな！, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, ¡No te metas con el club de cine! - Eizouken, ¡No te acerques al club de cine!,

Mumintroll, Moomins, Moomins, Mumins, 楽しいムーミン一家, The Moonins, Los Mumins, Muumilaakso, Mumindalen, Moominvalley,

スコット・ピルグリム テイクス・オフ, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, Scott Pilgrim Da El Salto,

光が死んだ夏, The Summer Hikaru Died, El verano cuando la luz murió, El verano en el que Hikaru murió,

TV series: Cartoons

Steven Universe,

Steven Universe: Future, Steven Universe: Futuro, Steven Universe: The Movie, Steven Universe: La Película,

The Owl House, La Casa Búho,

Over The Garden Wall, Más Allá del Jardín,

Gravity Falls, Gravity Falls: Un Verano de Misterios, The Book of Bill, El libro de Bill,

Invader Zim, Invasor Zim, Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus!, Invasor Zim y El Poder del Florpus,

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, My Little Pony: La Magia de la Amistad, My Little Pony, Mi Pequeño Pony,

My Little Pony: Equestria Girls, My Little Pony: Equestria Girls - Rainbow Rocks,

Inside Job, Trabajo Incógnito,

Adventure Time, Hora de Aventura,

Adventure Time: Distant Lands, Hora de Aventura: Tierras Lejanas,

Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake, Hora de Aventura: Fionna y Cake, Hora de Aventura con Fionna y Cake,

Avatar: The Last Airbender, Avatar: La leyenda de Aang, Avatar: El Último Maestro Aire,

OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes, ¡OK K.O.! Seamos Héroes,

The Cuphead Show!, ¡El show de Cuphead!, ¡La serie de Cuphead!,

Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, No Me Abraces Tengo Miedo,

The Powerpuff Girls, Las Chicas Superpoderosas, 出ましたっ!パワパフガールズZ, Powerpuff Girls Z, Las Chicas Superpoderosas Z,

Monster High,

Ever After High,

Barbie,

Care Bears, Ositos Cariñositos,

Garfield,

The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack,

Star vs. the Forces of Evil, Star vs. las Fuerzas del Mal,

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Tortugas Ninja,

LEGO Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitzu, Lego Ninjago: Maestros del Spinjitzu, The Lego Ninjago Movie, LEGO Ninjago: La Película,

Live-Action series

Fraggle Rock, Los Fráguel,

The Muppets, Los Muppets, Los Teleñecos,

Yo soy Betty La Fea,

Animated Movies

The LEGO Movie, La Gran Aventura LEGO,

The Lego Ninjago Movie, LEGO Ninjago: La Película,

The LEGO Batman Movie, LEGO Batman: La Película,

Puss In Boots, El Gato con Botas,

Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, Gato con Botas: El Último Deseo,

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Spider-Man: Un Nuevo Universo, Spider-Man: Hacia el Spider-Verso,

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Spider-Man: A través del Spider-Verso,

Turning Red,

Moana, Moana: Un Mar de Aventuras,

The Bad Guys, Los Tipos Malos,

The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Super Mario Bros.: La Película, Mario,

Sonic The Hedgehog, Sonic The Hedgehog 2, Sonic the Hedgehog 3,

Inside Out, Inside Out 2, Intensamente, Intensamente 2,

Intensamente 2,

The Lorax, Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax, El Lórax: En Busca de la Trúfula Perdida,

Garfield: The Movie, Garfield: La Película, Garfield,

Live-Action Movies

The Devil Wears Prada, El Diablo Viste A La Moda,

Bumblebee, Transformers: Bumblebee,

Scott Pilgrim VS. The World, Scott Pilgrim vs. los ex de la chica de sus sueños,

Barbie,

It: Chapter One, It: Chapter Two,

Books / Comics / Graphic Novels

El Libro de Bill, The Book of Bill,

Scott Pilgrim,

Diary of a Wimpy Kid, El Diario de Greg, El Diario De Un Chico En Apuros,

Videogames

MOTHER 1, マザー, Mother, EarthBound Beginnings, EarthBound Zero, ＭＯＴＨＥＲ,

MOTHER 2, MOTHER 2 ギーグの逆襲, Mother 2: Giygas Strikes Back, Mother 2: Giygas Contraataca, EarthBound, ＭＯＴＨＥＲ,

MOTHER 3, マザースリー, ＭＯＴＨＥＲ,

UNDERTALE, Undertale, UnderTale,

DELTARUNE, Deltarune, DeltaRune, Delta Rune,

Cuphead, Cuphead: Don't deal with The Devil, Cuphead: No Hagas Tratos con El Diablo,

ポケモン, Pokémon,

霧雨が降る森, The Forest of Drizzling Rain, El Bosque de la Llovizna,

モゲコキャッスル, Mogeko Castle, Castillo Mogeko,

灰色庭園, Grey Garden, Jardín Gris,

イヴ, Ib

ヤンデレラ, Yanderella,

Five Nights at Freddy's, Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach,

ソニック, ソニック・ザ・ヘッジホッグ, Sonic the Hedgehog, The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic Frontiers, ソニックプライム, Sonic Prime, ソニック,

OFF, Off, ゆめにっき, Yume Nikki: Dream Diary, Diario de Sueños,

Web Stuff

ボーカロイド, Vocaloid,

Bee and PuppyCat,

Don't Hug Me I'm Scared,

Hazbin Hotel, Hazbin Hotel: El Hotel de las Viejas Glorias,

Helluva Boss,

The Amazing Digital Circus, El Asombroso Circo Digital,

Welcome Home,

Musicals

Dear Evan Hansen, Querido Evan Hansen,

Be More Chill, Be More Chill: The Musical,

Heathers, Escuela de Jóvenes Asesinos, Heathers: The Musical,

Mean Girls, Mean Girls: The Musical, Chicas Pesadas,

Legally Blonde, Legally Blonde: The Musical, Legalmente Rubia,

Waitress: The Musical,

SpongeBob SquarePants: The Musical, The SpongeBob Musical,

The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals,

Hamilton: An American Musical,

The Book of Mormon,

Frankenstein: The Musical,

[anxiousdragoncollector]

Story time

Back when I thought I was the hot shit and writing fanfic, I had the bright idea to merge the two fandoms that lived in my mind at the time, Wings of Fire and Boku No Hero Academia.

The idea was that Thorn decided to make a boat school (Jade Academy) and sailed around the world collecting kids Batman style

This was the chart I made (plus some info)

Qibli Scorpion Egyptian

Winter cold resistance Russian

Moon prophetic mind reader tai

Kinkajou Chameleon Australian

Turtle Glowfish greek

Peril boil blood Spanish Japanese

Anemone enchant Greek

Tsunami Water breath greek

Luna firesilk Columbian

Blue Butterfly Columbian

Sundew plant speak Brazilian

Starflight fire breath tai

Sunny quirkless Pakistani-Japanese

Clay fire immunity African-American

Glory venom Australian

Darkstalker magic scroll-villain Korean

Deathbringer slow moving Thai/filipino

Thorn Desert-principal Pakistani

Cricket telekinesis immunity British

Wasp mind control bees-villain British

Blaze sand shifting Nigerian

Jambu vanish Australian

Coral Gills greek

Willow memory feeler Brazilian

Lizard immortality Mesopotamian

Swordtail moth Columbian

Io spider Columbian

Wren language Mexican

Sky quirkless Spanish-Japanese

Webs webbed hands greek history teacher

Fatespeaker make believe Filipino

Pike Shark Shifter from Cyprus

Chameleon/Hisashi illusional disguise Japanese

Clay would cook a bunch of food and he would play Reaper Roulette w some of the others. One food has Carolina Reaper seeds in it (the spiciest part, i think), and whoever gets that food has to eat the whole thing. Sundew and Tsunami love it

Clay sleeps in The kitchen. And every morning, he makes breakfasts from around the world

Thorn created the school, so Sunny has lived there her whole life

Kinkajou and/or Sunny carries around stickon Rhinestones to bedazzle people.

Jade Academy is also a safe for young children until they can find a home. Or they just live there and get a great education

Queen Scarlet was a black market lord who ran illegal fights. Peril was her champion

And since Turtle is in the other dorm and Moon sleeps w Qibli, and Glory w Deathbringer, Kinkajou cuddles w Sunny. She is afraid to sleep alone because Thorn rescued her from child trafficking. She was taken while she was alone and put into labor exploiting

Most students change names once joining, sometimes to escape their pasts

Chameleon basically shifted into a Japanese man who married Inko, making Peril, Sky, and Izuku half-siblings

[i-probably-ship-it]

Kinkmas prompts

I may be part of the community but by no means it makes me even partially an expert, the same goes for writing, I love to but I, like many, have not perfected it by far

Please tell me if there is a specific Fandom and promt you would like to see, of course I can only wait about a week to a week and a half, I still need time to write them before Christmas!

I have a couple in mind like Kathryn Janeway x reader insert for maybe red 1.2

I have two images because there are many things we need more stories for immio XD I just need the color of the image, prompt number/ what you'd like to see, the Fandom(s)/ character(s), x character, reader or a mix, and smut/ fluff/ mixed or whatever, I do have some prompts I wouldn't feel too comfortable writing but it's honestly out of being able to correctly represent it, I swear! I'm fine with any manner of lgbtq, being omni/ genderqueer and polyam myself but I may not be able write some of it very well? I would absolutely try my best ofcc!

Fandoms I will write for aren't exactly limited, some are a bit iffy if I haven't watched it/ read it or it's been awhile, please ask if you're unsure! ANY CHILDREN/ MINORS WILL NOT BE INVOLVED IN SMUT OR ANGST OK, ONLY FLUFF I may age them up if that's what you ask ofc, I might do well known/ not so known ships if it's ethical/ not illegal, again, DON'T BE AFRAID TO ASK!

Live: Star Trek (Tos, Tng, Voyager, Ds9 mainly) 2 Broke girls, Bones, NCIS, Some Grey's Anatomy, Svu (just because they're part of special victims unit doesn't mean ishh), some Blue Bloods and more!

Anime (animated): Scooby-Doo, Inuyasha, Naruto, Unicorn Academy, Mlp (FiM or Eq), Fruit basket, some demon slayer, My hero Academia, Batman, some Haikyuu! Vampire Knight, some Servamp and more!

[cleverhottubmiracle]

An unrepentant lifetime smoker, David Hockney, 87, wheezes from respiratory difficulties. He sleeps during some of the day and is watched over by round-the-clock nurses. His deafness, the first signs of which he noticed in 1979, has worsened considerably, so that even with hearing aids he relies on lipreading to facilitate conversation. In July 2023, he moved to London from his house in rural Normandy, France, partly because he needed to be in close range of a hospital in case of an emergency.And yet, for three hours or so each day, Hockney marshals his energies to sit down and paint. Earlier this year, he was still making pictures to include in his largest exhibition to date, “David Hockney, 25,” a retrospective scheduled to open on April 9 at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, in Paris. Working with his companion, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, who is known as JP, Hockney has been instrumental in shaping the contours of the show.As the title indicates, “David Hockney, 25” will spotlight his 21st--century output, pictures he has made in the past 25 years. “He’s done a huge amount of work in that period,” says Sir Norman Rosenthal, former head of the Royal Academy of Arts, who is the Fondation’s guest curator. “He’s a kind of Picasso figure, in terms of the breadth and variety of concentration and the sheer production.” The exhibition will also include some earlier iconic works, among them A Bigger Splash (1967), Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1970–71), and Portrait of an -Artist (Pool With Two Figures) (1972)—the last of which sold in 2018 for $90.3 million, a price that remains the record at auction for a painting by a living artist.Hockney’s painting After Blake: Less Is Known Than People Think, 2024.Jonathan Wilkinson, © David Hockney.Like his hero, Picasso, Hockney has managed to create a prodigious quantity of acclaimed art while maintaining a public persona that enjoys brand-name recognition. A celebrity since his mid-20s, he dyed his dark hair blond and wore oversize round eyeglasses, guilelessly crafting a look that distinguished him from the crowd. Shunning plain clothes, he opted for checks, tattersalls, plaids, and, especially, stripes. His socks were brightly colored and mismatched. A cigarette was never far from his lips.Also like Picasso, he immortalized a succession of lovers in a multitude of portraits—only in Hockney’s case, the lovers are male. While a student at the Royal College of Art, in London, at a time when -homosexuality was still illegal in Britain, he depicted gay sexuality and domesticity with courageous insouciance. Back then, influenced by Jean Dubuffet, he was making blocky “art brut” figures—but Hockney’s boxy men were hugging and kissing (We Two Boys Together Clinging, 1961) or engaged in reciprocal fellatio (Adhesiveness, 1960). His life-study painting, a requirement for graduation, was inspired by a muscleman posing on the cover of a homoerotic physique magazine. Was he penalized? To the contrary, his paintings were praised in the press after being chosen in two consecutive years for the “Young Contemporaries” show in a London gallery. Upon graduation, he was awarded a gold medal of distinction with his diploma. He wore a gold lamé jacket to the ceremony.In 1974, Sir John Rothenstein, the longtime director of the Tate, wrote that Hockney “enjoyed an immediate, international success that began when he was still a student—something achieved by no serious painter within my earlier personal experience.” Through his beguiling personality as well as his talent, he entered elite social circles, making dear friends of Christopher Isherwood and Billy Wilder, and fraternizing with the likes of Andy Warhol, Paloma Picasso, Amanda Lear, Karl Lagerfeld, Tony Richardson, Dennis Hopper, Stephen Spender…the list goes on and on.Clockwise from top left: A portrait by Cecil Beaton, 1965; Hockney, with artists Raymond Foye (left) and Jerry Sohn, in front of a wall-size work, 1980; with the painting that won him the first prize at the John Moores National Museums Liverpool exhibition, 1967; Hockney, circa 1985; in Los Angeles, circa 1978; Hockney’s painting The Most Beautiful Boy in the World being hung at the Royal College of Art’s “Young Contemporaries” exhibition in London, 1961; the film poster for A Bigger Splash, 1973; at work in his studio, 1984; Mozart’s The Magic Flute, with sets designed by Hockney, 1987; with Peter Schlesinger on the set of A Bigger Splash; Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures), 1972. Clockwise from top left: Cecil Beaton, Condé Nast via Getty Images; Susan Wood/Getty Images; WATFORD/Mirrorpix/Mirrorpix via Getty Images; Michael Childers/Corbis via Getty Images; Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images; LMPC via Getty Images; Ron Bull/Toronto Star via Getty Images; Ron Scherl/Redferns; Moviestore/Shutterstock; Jenni Carter, © David Hockney; Corbis/VCG via Getty Images.He owes his popularity with a wider audience to his skill in constructing a fully inhabited and furnished universe. That was especially true of Los Angeles, which he, more than any other artist, has visually defined in the public’s imagination. He moved there in 1964, having idealized it—and painted it—beforehand, with an erotic aura he absorbed from reading Physique Pictorial and gay fiction. As he looked down from the airplane and saw the profusion of blue swimming pools, he knew he had found his home.Over the next decades, Hockney would depict L.A. as a collection of shimmering pools, towering palms, and low-slung modernist houses, all aglow in a flat bright light. And the city, in turn, would leave its mark on him. Before he arrived, he was painting people as heads atop rectangles. Beginning in 1966 with a painting of a friend, the gallerist Nick Wilder, he began doing portraits of specific people.In his personal life, he was teaching an art course at UCLA, and at the start of the term he fell for an 18-year-old student, Peter Schlesinger. Their five-year relationship was the first love of Hockney’s life. Its dissolution in 1971, chronicled with unusual intimacy in Jack Hazan’s semi-fictionalized documentary A Bigger Splash, left him bereft. He expressed his forlorn feelings in his work, most famously in Portrait of an Artist, with the artist being Schlesinger, who is standing at the edge of a pool and looking down at a man swimming.Clockwise from top left: Hockney’s Portrait of My Father, 1955; with his then partner, Peter Schlesinger, 1969; at home in Los Angeles, 1987; with his dog, circa 1999; poolside in Los Angeles with David Stoltz (left) and Ian Falconer, circa 1978; a painting of his current companion, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, 2013; with Celia Birtwell beside Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy, 1970–71; in the Hollywood Hills, circa 1978; his memoir David Hockney by David Hockney: My Early Years, 1988; with Paloma Picasso, 1984; Hockney’s painting Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, 1968; Cecil Beaton and Hockney, photographed by Schlesinger, 1970; with Keith Haring at Mr Chow restaurant, 1985.Clockwise from top left: Richard Schmidt, The David Hockney Foundation, © David Hockney; Chris Morphet/Redferns/Getty Images; Anthony Barboza/Getty Images; Mikel Roberts/Sygma via Getty Images; Michael Childers/Corbis via Getty Images; © David Hockney; Nick Harvey/WireImage; Michael Childers/Corbis via Getty Images; Abe Books; Alan Davidson/Shutterstock; Fabrice Gibert, © David Hockney; Peter Schlesinger; © Ben Buchanan, American Art Archives.For the most part, however, his portrayals of pools, especially in Los Angeles, were sunnier. In 1988, in the catalog for a Hockney retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, its director Earl A. Powell III wrote, “It is through Hockney’s work that many people derive their impressions of life in Southern California, a landscape redolent with sunshine, swimming pools, and palm trees.” That was 37 years ago. The smoke of the catastrophic L.A. wildfires was still fresh when I asked Hockney for his reaction to the devastation. He has two homes there, one in the Hollywood Hills and one in Malibu, on the beach. The golden dream of Southern California was now grievously smudged. “I lived in L.A. for 30 years, and I probably won’t go back now,” he told me, speaking through an associate who read him my questions. “Somebody said my little house on the beach survived because it was on rocks and you went up the steps to the wooden garages. And maybe it has. I don’t know. I am sure it must be a sadder place, L.A. right now.”But looking back feels unnatural to Hockney. He prefers to make new work that can be included in the upcoming show. In his latest self-portrait, he adopted a characteristic pose, seated in his garden, drawing a tree with one hand and holding a cigarette in the other. He has also made recent studies of his nurses, Lewis and Sonja. These paintings are tinged with the wistful tenderness that can come in old age to those fortunate enough to accept it gracefully. “I recently did Lewis and Sonja because I have got to know their faces, you see, because they are looking at me and I am looking at them,” he said. “Otherwise, you are not sure what people really look like. I know we are all different—everybody’s different. And like the leaves on the trees, they fall off at different times; they don’t all fall off at once.”Hockney with his dog, Tess.Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, © David Hockney.Hockney’s budding years took place in a working-class household in Bradford, a city in northern England. His father, a pacifist, was an accountant’s clerk; his mother, a devout Methodist and a vegetarian, tended the home. They recognized Hockney’s artistic talent and drive at an early age and, with some hesitation, bowed to his insistence that he forgo getting a job and instead attend the Bradford School of Art, a well-regarded institution. He received a first-class diploma with honors and was admitted for postgraduate work at both the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal College of Art, two of the most prestigious art schools in Britain. When he received his diploma from the Royal College of Art, in 1962, he already had been represented for a year by a dealer, John Kasmin, and was known in the London art world. Counter to the usual story of an artist clawing his way to recognition, he had to resist the temptation to rest on his laurels. By the time he was 40, he was a global celebrity.That is how old he was when I first spoke with him, in 1978, in his studio in the Notting Hill district of London. I was a young magazine journalist, interviewing him about the sets he was creating for a Glyndebourne Festival production of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. Looking back at my interview notes, I see that Hockney was already coping with the weight of his achievements. “It gets harder to paint as you go on, partly because you’ve got your own work of the past to think about,” he said then. “So, it’s both a burden and an advantage. And, of course, you always want to paint better pictures. Otherwise, you wouldn’t go on; you’d give up.”With that in mind, he had been revisiting some of his early paintings. At one point, he said, he had dismissed them as “awfully poor and inconsistent”—in short, “dreadful.” But then he saw them again at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1970 and revised his opinion. “You could see how I’d taken up some ideas and moved along with them and abandoned some and moved into other areas,” he said. “Obviously, great artists give you standards that you want to try and attempt to reach, but I’m not stupid. I can’t paint like Velázquez or Goya or Picasso. I would be mad to try. I just don’t have that kind of skill at all.”Hockney’s painting After Munch: Less Is Known Than People Think, 2023.Jonathan Wilkinson, © David Hockney.Despite his modesty, Hockney possesses draftsmanship skills that surpass those of most of his contemporaries. Plus, he has the advantage of being an artist of his time. Early on, he was able to soak up what other artists were doing—such as the shaped canvases of Frank Stella and Jasper Johns, and the color field ring abstractions of Kenneth Noland, which can be readily detected in his Royal College of Art paintings. “At one time, I believed my work had to look like modern art or it wasn’t any good,” he said in that conversation decades ago. “Then I slowly began to realize that was a silly way of looking at it. Art can’t go backwards. Even if everybody starts painting just what’s in front of them, they can’t paint the way it was done 50 years ago. It’s just not possible. Then you begin to realize, if this is an impossibility, there’s no use worrying about something you couldn’t avoid anyway.”Later, when living in Los Angeles, Hockney became obsessed with the challenge of conveying a sense of movement and the passage of time in a two-dimensional painting. In the 1980s, he started taking Polaroids to make bigger and bigger collages. He was seeking to emulate Cubism in undermining single-point perspective, which places a viewer in a static posture, facing a scene that recedes to a vanishing point. Treating photos as his building blocks, he constructed compositions that culminated in 1986 in Pearblossom Hwy., which comprises more than 700 -photographs to represent varying viewpoints that you would see from the front seat of a car while riding down a desert highway. In his paintings, too, he incorporated motion. Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio, from 1980, depicts a sinuous road that snakes through a scene of pointillist patchwork, in colors as bright as those of the Fauvists, juxtaposed with a section that has the bleached-out rectilinearity of a road map.Much of the work on view in Paris will reveal Hockney’s infatuation with the latest technologies. In late 2008, he began making drawings, initially of flowers, on his iPhone, a device that had been introduced only a year before. By then he had moved his primary residence from Los Angeles to a town called Bridlington, on the coast of East Yorkshire, about 80 miles from Bradford. “The reason I was good on the iPhone was that I always had quite small sketchbooks in my pocket, so with it being small, it didn’t matter to me that much,” he said. “I drew on the phone with my thumb mostly, and then I got a stylus. But the first ones, 30 or 40, were drawn with just a thumb.” He purchased an iPad in June 2010, as soon as it became available. Hockney had been stippling and crosshatching with ink on paper or acrylic paint on canvas, and the tablet allowed him a quicker, easier way to proceed. In Bridlington, he also returned to oil painting, inspired by the landscape, which he portrayed in acid greens and shocking mauves, similar to the colors on the prints made from his iPad drawings.Hockney at his reading table.Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, © David Hockney.When he made his next move, to a half-timbered 17th-century house in Normandy in 2019, with JP, who is French, he was comfortable shifting back and forth between iPad sketches, ink drawings, and paintings. In Normandy, he made a series of acrylic portraits of friends and relatives who came to visit: his brother Richard; the three adult children of the fashion designers Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell; record producer Clive Davis; and—surprisingly, because he dislikes painting portraits of people he hasn’t known for a long time—Harry Styles. Loose and relaxed, they exemplify what Hockney is aiming for at this point in his life. “My approach to portraiture has changed,” he told me. “Now I don’t really draw a preparatory sketch on the canvas. I just start painting, which is a bit riskier because wherever you put the head, the body has to fit. But I’m enjoying it, and I think most of the portraits are quite successful.”The Paris show is weighted toward his portraiture, and it pays primary attention to the paintings and drawings he produced in Bridlington and Normandy. But it will span the enormous arc of his career, beginning with the portrait he made of his father in Bradford in 1955, which was the first painting he sold. Some artists are daunted to see the scope of all they have created. It paralyzes them into uncertainty about where to make their next move. I asked Hockney, who has had so many retrospectives (including a gigantic one at Tate Britain and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when he turned 80 in 2017), whether that possibility worried him. He said that Sir Alan Bowness, a former director of Tate, once told him that many artists couldn’t work for months after such an exhibition. Hockney dismissed that fear with characteristic nonchalance. “Well, I just go on,” he told me. “I never bother.” Puckishly, he added, “Anyway, at my age now, I couldn’t really freeze.” Source link

[norajworld]

An unrepentant lifetime smoker, David Hockney, 87, wheezes from respiratory difficulties. He sleeps during some of the day and is watched over by round-the-clock nurses. His deafness, the first signs of which he noticed in 1979, has worsened considerably, so that even with hearing aids he relies on lipreading to facilitate conversation. In July 2023, he moved to London from his house in rural Normandy, France, partly because he needed to be in close range of a hospital in case of an emergency.And yet, for three hours or so each day, Hockney marshals his energies to sit down and paint. Earlier this year, he was still making pictures to include in his largest exhibition to date, “David Hockney, 25,” a retrospective scheduled to open on April 9 at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, in Paris. Working with his companion, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, who is known as JP, Hockney has been instrumental in shaping the contours of the show.As the title indicates, “David Hockney, 25” will spotlight his 21st--century output, pictures he has made in the past 25 years. “He’s done a huge amount of work in that period,” says Sir Norman Rosenthal, former head of the Royal Academy of Arts, who is the Fondation’s guest curator. “He’s a kind of Picasso figure, in terms of the breadth and variety of concentration and the sheer production.” The exhibition will also include some earlier iconic works, among them A Bigger Splash (1967), Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1970–71), and Portrait of an -Artist (Pool With Two Figures) (1972)—the last of which sold in 2018 for $90.3 million, a price that remains the record at auction for a painting by a living artist.Hockney’s painting After Blake: Less Is Known Than People Think, 2024.Jonathan Wilkinson, © David Hockney.Like his hero, Picasso, Hockney has managed to create a prodigious quantity of acclaimed art while maintaining a public persona that enjoys brand-name recognition. A celebrity since his mid-20s, he dyed his dark hair blond and wore oversize round eyeglasses, guilelessly crafting a look that distinguished him from the crowd. Shunning plain clothes, he opted for checks, tattersalls, plaids, and, especially, stripes. His socks were brightly colored and mismatched. A cigarette was never far from his lips.Also like Picasso, he immortalized a succession of lovers in a multitude of portraits—only in Hockney’s case, the lovers are male. While a student at the Royal College of Art, in London, at a time when -homosexuality was still illegal in Britain, he depicted gay sexuality and domesticity with courageous insouciance. Back then, influenced by Jean Dubuffet, he was making blocky “art brut” figures—but Hockney’s boxy men were hugging and kissing (We Two Boys Together Clinging, 1961) or engaged in reciprocal fellatio (Adhesiveness, 1960). His life-study painting, a requirement for graduation, was inspired by a muscleman posing on the cover of a homoerotic physique magazine. Was he penalized? To the contrary, his paintings were praised in the press after being chosen in two consecutive years for the “Young Contemporaries” show in a London gallery. Upon graduation, he was awarded a gold medal of distinction with his diploma. He wore a gold lamé jacket to the ceremony.In 1974, Sir John Rothenstein, the longtime director of the Tate, wrote that Hockney “enjoyed an immediate, international success that began when he was still a student—something achieved by no serious painter within my earlier personal experience.” Through his beguiling personality as well as his talent, he entered elite social circles, making dear friends of Christopher Isherwood and Billy Wilder, and fraternizing with the likes of Andy Warhol, Paloma Picasso, Amanda Lear, Karl Lagerfeld, Tony Richardson, Dennis Hopper, Stephen Spender…the list goes on and on.Clockwise from top left: A portrait by Cecil Beaton, 1965; Hockney, with artists Raymond Foye (left) and Jerry Sohn, in front of a wall-size work, 1980; with the painting that won him the first prize at the John Moores National Museums Liverpool exhibition, 1967; Hockney, circa 1985; in Los Angeles, circa 1978; Hockney’s painting The Most Beautiful Boy in the World being hung at the Royal College of Art’s “Young Contemporaries” exhibition in London, 1961; the film poster for A Bigger Splash, 1973; at work in his studio, 1984; Mozart’s The Magic Flute, with sets designed by Hockney, 1987; with Peter Schlesinger on the set of A Bigger Splash; Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures), 1972. Clockwise from top left: Cecil Beaton, Condé Nast via Getty Images; Susan Wood/Getty Images; WATFORD/Mirrorpix/Mirrorpix via Getty Images; Michael Childers/Corbis via Getty Images; Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images; LMPC via Getty Images; Ron Bull/Toronto Star via Getty Images; Ron Scherl/Redferns; Moviestore/Shutterstock; Jenni Carter, © David Hockney; Corbis/VCG via Getty Images.He owes his popularity with a wider audience to his skill in constructing a fully inhabited and furnished universe. That was especially true of Los Angeles, which he, more than any other artist, has visually defined in the public’s imagination. He moved there in 1964, having idealized it—and painted it—beforehand, with an erotic aura he absorbed from reading Physique Pictorial and gay fiction. As he looked down from the airplane and saw the profusion of blue swimming pools, he knew he had found his home.Over the next decades, Hockney would depict L.A. as a collection of shimmering pools, towering palms, and low-slung modernist houses, all aglow in a flat bright light. And the city, in turn, would leave its mark on him. Before he arrived, he was painting people as heads atop rectangles. Beginning in 1966 with a painting of a friend, the gallerist Nick Wilder, he began doing portraits of specific people.In his personal life, he was teaching an art course at UCLA, and at the start of the term he fell for an 18-year-old student, Peter Schlesinger. Their five-year relationship was the first love of Hockney’s life. Its dissolution in 1971, chronicled with unusual intimacy in Jack Hazan’s semi-fictionalized documentary A Bigger Splash, left him bereft. He expressed his forlorn feelings in his work, most famously in Portrait of an Artist, with the artist being Schlesinger, who is standing at the edge of a pool and looking down at a man swimming.Clockwise from top left: Hockney’s Portrait of My Father, 1955; with his then partner, Peter Schlesinger, 1969; at home in Los Angeles, 1987; with his dog, circa 1999; poolside in Los Angeles with David Stoltz (left) and Ian Falconer, circa 1978; a painting of his current companion, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, 2013; with Celia Birtwell beside Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy, 1970–71; in the Hollywood Hills, circa 1978; his memoir David Hockney by David Hockney: My Early Years, 1988; with Paloma Picasso, 1984; Hockney’s painting Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, 1968; Cecil Beaton and Hockney, photographed by Schlesinger, 1970; with Keith Haring at Mr Chow restaurant, 1985.Clockwise from top left: Richard Schmidt, The David Hockney Foundation, © David Hockney; Chris Morphet/Redferns/Getty Images; Anthony Barboza/Getty Images; Mikel Roberts/Sygma via Getty Images; Michael Childers/Corbis via Getty Images; © David Hockney; Nick Harvey/WireImage; Michael Childers/Corbis via Getty Images; Abe Books; Alan Davidson/Shutterstock; Fabrice Gibert, © David Hockney; Peter Schlesinger; © Ben Buchanan, American Art Archives.For the most part, however, his portrayals of pools, especially in Los Angeles, were sunnier. In 1988, in the catalog for a Hockney retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, its director Earl A. Powell III wrote, “It is through Hockney’s work that many people derive their impressions of life in Southern California, a landscape redolent with sunshine, swimming pools, and palm trees.” That was 37 years ago. The smoke of the catastrophic L.A. wildfires was still fresh when I asked Hockney for his reaction to the devastation. He has two homes there, one in the Hollywood Hills and one in Malibu, on the beach. The golden dream of Southern California was now grievously smudged. “I lived in L.A. for 30 years, and I probably won’t go back now,” he told me, speaking through an associate who read him my questions. “Somebody said my little house on the beach survived because it was on rocks and you went up the steps to the wooden garages. And maybe it has. I don’t know. I am sure it must be a sadder place, L.A. right now.”But looking back feels unnatural to Hockney. He prefers to make new work that can be included in the upcoming show. In his latest self-portrait, he adopted a characteristic pose, seated in his garden, drawing a tree with one hand and holding a cigarette in the other. He has also made recent studies of his nurses, Lewis and Sonja. These paintings are tinged with the wistful tenderness that can come in old age to those fortunate enough to accept it gracefully. “I recently did Lewis and Sonja because I have got to know their faces, you see, because they are looking at me and I am looking at them,” he said. “Otherwise, you are not sure what people really look like. I know we are all different—everybody’s different. And like the leaves on the trees, they fall off at different times; they don’t all fall off at once.”Hockney with his dog, Tess.Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, © David Hockney.Hockney’s budding years took place in a working-class household in Bradford, a city in northern England. His father, a pacifist, was an accountant’s clerk; his mother, a devout Methodist and a vegetarian, tended the home. They recognized Hockney’s artistic talent and drive at an early age and, with some hesitation, bowed to his insistence that he forgo getting a job and instead attend the Bradford School of Art, a well-regarded institution. He received a first-class diploma with honors and was admitted for postgraduate work at both the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal College of Art, two of the most prestigious art schools in Britain. When he received his diploma from the Royal College of Art, in 1962, he already had been represented for a year by a dealer, John Kasmin, and was known in the London art world. Counter to the usual story of an artist clawing his way to recognition, he had to resist the temptation to rest on his laurels. By the time he was 40, he was a global celebrity.That is how old he was when I first spoke with him, in 1978, in his studio in the Notting Hill district of London. I was a young magazine journalist, interviewing him about the sets he was creating for a Glyndebourne Festival production of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. Looking back at my interview notes, I see that Hockney was already coping with the weight of his achievements. “It gets harder to paint as you go on, partly because you’ve got your own work of the past to think about,” he said then. “So, it’s both a burden and an advantage. And, of course, you always want to paint better pictures. Otherwise, you wouldn’t go on; you’d give up.”With that in mind, he had been revisiting some of his early paintings. At one point, he said, he had dismissed them as “awfully poor and inconsistent”—in short, “dreadful.” But then he saw them again at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1970 and revised his opinion. “You could see how I’d taken up some ideas and moved along with them and abandoned some and moved into other areas,” he said. “Obviously, great artists give you standards that you want to try and attempt to reach, but I’m not stupid. I can’t paint like Velázquez or Goya or Picasso. I would be mad to try. I just don’t have that kind of skill at all.”Hockney’s painting After Munch: Less Is Known Than People Think, 2023.Jonathan Wilkinson, © David Hockney.Despite his modesty, Hockney possesses draftsmanship skills that surpass those of most of his contemporaries. Plus, he has the advantage of being an artist of his time. Early on, he was able to soak up what other artists were doing—such as the shaped canvases of Frank Stella and Jasper Johns, and the color field ring abstractions of Kenneth Noland, which can be readily detected in his Royal College of Art paintings. “At one time, I believed my work had to look like modern art or it wasn’t any good,” he said in that conversation decades ago. “Then I slowly began to realize that was a silly way of looking at it. Art can’t go backwards. Even if everybody starts painting just what’s in front of them, they can’t paint the way it was done 50 years ago. It’s just not possible. Then you begin to realize, if this is an impossibility, there’s no use worrying about something you couldn’t avoid anyway.”Later, when living in Los Angeles, Hockney became obsessed with the challenge of conveying a sense of movement and the passage of time in a two-dimensional painting. In the 1980s, he started taking Polaroids to make bigger and bigger collages. He was seeking to emulate Cubism in undermining single-point perspective, which places a viewer in a static posture, facing a scene that recedes to a vanishing point. Treating photos as his building blocks, he constructed compositions that culminated in 1986 in Pearblossom Hwy., which comprises more than 700 -photographs to represent varying viewpoints that you would see from the front seat of a car while riding down a desert highway. In his paintings, too, he incorporated motion. Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio, from 1980, depicts a sinuous road that snakes through a scene of pointillist patchwork, in colors as bright as those of the Fauvists, juxtaposed with a section that has the bleached-out rectilinearity of a road map.Much of the work on view in Paris will reveal Hockney’s infatuation with the latest technologies. In late 2008, he began making drawings, initially of flowers, on his iPhone, a device that had been introduced only a year before. By then he had moved his primary residence from Los Angeles to a town called Bridlington, on the coast of East Yorkshire, about 80 miles from Bradford. “The reason I was good on the iPhone was that I always had quite small sketchbooks in my pocket, so with it being small, it didn’t matter to me that much,” he said. “I drew on the phone with my thumb mostly, and then I got a stylus. But the first ones, 30 or 40, were drawn with just a thumb.” He purchased an iPad in June 2010, as soon as it became available. Hockney had been stippling and crosshatching with ink on paper or acrylic paint on canvas, and the tablet allowed him a quicker, easier way to proceed. In Bridlington, he also returned to oil painting, inspired by the landscape, which he portrayed in acid greens and shocking mauves, similar to the colors on the prints made from his iPad drawings.Hockney at his reading table.Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, © David Hockney.When he made his next move, to a half-timbered 17th-century house in Normandy in 2019, with JP, who is French, he was comfortable shifting back and forth between iPad sketches, ink drawings, and paintings. In Normandy, he made a series of acrylic portraits of friends and relatives who came to visit: his brother Richard; the three adult children of the fashion designers Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell; record producer Clive Davis; and—surprisingly, because he dislikes painting portraits of people he hasn’t known for a long time—Harry Styles. Loose and relaxed, they exemplify what Hockney is aiming for at this point in his life. “My approach to portraiture has changed,” he told me. “Now I don’t really draw a preparatory sketch on the canvas. I just start painting, which is a bit riskier because wherever you put the head, the body has to fit. But I’m enjoying it, and I think most of the portraits are quite successful.”The Paris show is weighted toward his portraiture, and it pays primary attention to the paintings and drawings he produced in Bridlington and Normandy. But it will span the enormous arc of his career, beginning with the portrait he made of his father in Bradford in 1955, which was the first painting he sold. Some artists are daunted to see the scope of all they have created. It paralyzes them into uncertainty about where to make their next move. I asked Hockney, who has had so many retrospectives (including a gigantic one at Tate Britain and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when he turned 80 in 2017), whether that possibility worried him. He said that Sir Alan Bowness, a former director of Tate, once told him that many artists couldn’t work for months after such an exhibition. Hockney dismissed that fear with characteristic nonchalance. “Well, I just go on,” he told me. “I never bother.” Puckishly, he added, “Anyway, at my age now, I couldn’t really freeze.” Source link

[ellajme0]

An unrepentant lifetime smoker, David Hockney, 87, wheezes from respiratory difficulties. He sleeps during some of the day and is watched over by round-the-clock nurses. His deafness, the first signs of which he noticed in 1979, has worsened considerably, so that even with hearing aids he relies on lipreading to facilitate conversation. In July 2023, he moved to London from his house in rural Normandy, France, partly because he needed to be in close range of a hospital in case of an emergency.And yet, for three hours or so each day, Hockney marshals his energies to sit down and paint. Earlier this year, he was still making pictures to include in his largest exhibition to date, “David Hockney, 25,” a retrospective scheduled to open on April 9 at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, in Paris. Working with his companion, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, who is known as JP, Hockney has been instrumental in shaping the contours of the show.As the title indicates, “David Hockney, 25” will spotlight his 21st--century output, pictures he has made in the past 25 years. “He’s done a huge amount of work in that period,” says Sir Norman Rosenthal, former head of the Royal Academy of Arts, who is the Fondation’s guest curator. “He’s a kind of Picasso figure, in terms of the breadth and variety of concentration and the sheer production.” The exhibition will also include some earlier iconic works, among them A Bigger Splash (1967), Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1970–71), and Portrait of an -Artist (Pool With Two Figures) (1972)—the last of which sold in 2018 for $90.3 million, a price that remains the record at auction for a painting by a living artist.Hockney’s painting After Blake: Less Is Known Than People Think, 2024.Jonathan Wilkinson, © David Hockney.Like his hero, Picasso, Hockney has managed to create a prodigious quantity of acclaimed art while maintaining a public persona that enjoys brand-name recognition. A celebrity since his mid-20s, he dyed his dark hair blond and wore oversize round eyeglasses, guilelessly crafting a look that distinguished him from the crowd. Shunning plain clothes, he opted for checks, tattersalls, plaids, and, especially, stripes. His socks were brightly colored and mismatched. A cigarette was never far from his lips.Also like Picasso, he immortalized a succession of lovers in a multitude of portraits—only in Hockney’s case, the lovers are male. While a student at the Royal College of Art, in London, at a time when -homosexuality was still illegal in Britain, he depicted gay sexuality and domesticity with courageous insouciance. Back then, influenced by Jean Dubuffet, he was making blocky “art brut” figures—but Hockney’s boxy men were hugging and kissing (We Two Boys Together Clinging, 1961) or engaged in reciprocal fellatio (Adhesiveness, 1960). His life-study painting, a requirement for graduation, was inspired by a muscleman posing on the cover of a homoerotic physique magazine. Was he penalized? To the contrary, his paintings were praised in the press after being chosen in two consecutive years for the “Young Contemporaries” show in a London gallery. Upon graduation, he was awarded a gold medal of distinction with his diploma. He wore a gold lamé jacket to the ceremony.In 1974, Sir John Rothenstein, the longtime director of the Tate, wrote that Hockney “enjoyed an immediate, international success that began when he was still a student—something achieved by no serious painter within my earlier personal experience.” Through his beguiling personality as well as his talent, he entered elite social circles, making dear friends of Christopher Isherwood and Billy Wilder, and fraternizing with the likes of Andy Warhol, Paloma Picasso, Amanda Lear, Karl Lagerfeld, Tony Richardson, Dennis Hopper, Stephen Spender…the list goes on and on.Clockwise from top left: A portrait by Cecil Beaton, 1965; Hockney, with artists Raymond Foye (left) and Jerry Sohn, in front of a wall-size work, 1980; with the painting that won him the first prize at the John Moores National Museums Liverpool exhibition, 1967; Hockney, circa 1985; in Los Angeles, circa 1978; Hockney’s painting The Most Beautiful Boy in the World being hung at the Royal College of Art’s “Young Contemporaries” exhibition in London, 1961; the film poster for A Bigger Splash, 1973; at work in his studio, 1984; Mozart’s The Magic Flute, with sets designed by Hockney, 1987; with Peter Schlesinger on the set of A Bigger Splash; Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures), 1972. Clockwise from top left: Cecil Beaton, Condé Nast via Getty Images; Susan Wood/Getty Images; WATFORD/Mirrorpix/Mirrorpix via Getty Images; Michael Childers/Corbis via Getty Images; Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images; LMPC via Getty Images; Ron Bull/Toronto Star via Getty Images; Ron Scherl/Redferns; Moviestore/Shutterstock; Jenni Carter, © David Hockney; Corbis/VCG via Getty Images.He owes his popularity with a wider audience to his skill in constructing a fully inhabited and furnished universe. That was especially true of Los Angeles, which he, more than any other artist, has visually defined in the public’s imagination. He moved there in 1964, having idealized it—and painted it—beforehand, with an erotic aura he absorbed from reading Physique Pictorial and gay fiction. As he looked down from the airplane and saw the profusion of blue swimming pools, he knew he had found his home.Over the next decades, Hockney would depict L.A. as a collection of shimmering pools, towering palms, and low-slung modernist houses, all aglow in a flat bright light. And the city, in turn, would leave its mark on him. Before he arrived, he was painting people as heads atop rectangles. Beginning in 1966 with a painting of a friend, the gallerist Nick Wilder, he began doing portraits of specific people.In his personal life, he was teaching an art course at UCLA, and at the start of the term he fell for an 18-year-old student, Peter Schlesinger. Their five-year relationship was the first love of Hockney’s life. Its dissolution in 1971, chronicled with unusual intimacy in Jack Hazan’s semi-fictionalized documentary A Bigger Splash, left him bereft. He expressed his forlorn feelings in his work, most famously in Portrait of an Artist, with the artist being Schlesinger, who is standing at the edge of a pool and looking down at a man swimming.Clockwise from top left: Hockney’s Portrait of My Father, 1955; with his then partner, Peter Schlesinger, 1969; at home in Los Angeles, 1987; with his dog, circa 1999; poolside in Los Angeles with David Stoltz (left) and Ian Falconer, circa 1978; a painting of his current companion, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, 2013; with Celia Birtwell beside Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy, 1970–71; in the Hollywood Hills, circa 1978; his memoir David Hockney by David Hockney: My Early Years, 1988; with Paloma Picasso, 1984; Hockney’s painting Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, 1968; Cecil Beaton and Hockney, photographed by Schlesinger, 1970; with Keith Haring at Mr Chow restaurant, 1985.Clockwise from top left: Richard Schmidt, The David Hockney Foundation, © David Hockney; Chris Morphet/Redferns/Getty Images; Anthony Barboza/Getty Images; Mikel Roberts/Sygma via Getty Images; Michael Childers/Corbis via Getty Images; © David Hockney; Nick Harvey/WireImage; Michael Childers/Corbis via Getty Images; Abe Books; Alan Davidson/Shutterstock; Fabrice Gibert, © David Hockney; Peter Schlesinger; © Ben Buchanan, American Art Archives.For the most part, however, his portrayals of pools, especially in Los Angeles, were sunnier. In 1988, in the catalog for a Hockney retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, its director Earl A. Powell III wrote, “It is through Hockney’s work that many people derive their impressions of life in Southern California, a landscape redolent with sunshine, swimming pools, and palm trees.” That was 37 years ago. The smoke of the catastrophic L.A. wildfires was still fresh when I asked Hockney for his reaction to the devastation. He has two homes there, one in the Hollywood Hills and one in Malibu, on the beach. The golden dream of Southern California was now grievously smudged. “I lived in L.A. for 30 years, and I probably won’t go back now,” he told me, speaking through an associate who read him my questions. “Somebody said my little house on the beach survived because it was on rocks and you went up the steps to the wooden garages. And maybe it has. I don’t know. I am sure it must be a sadder place, L.A. right now.”But looking back feels unnatural to Hockney. He prefers to make new work that can be included in the upcoming show. In his latest self-portrait, he adopted a characteristic pose, seated in his garden, drawing a tree with one hand and holding a cigarette in the other. He has also made recent studies of his nurses, Lewis and Sonja. These paintings are tinged with the wistful tenderness that can come in old age to those fortunate enough to accept it gracefully. “I recently did Lewis and Sonja because I have got to know their faces, you see, because they are looking at me and I am looking at them,” he said. “Otherwise, you are not sure what people really look like. I know we are all different—everybody’s different. And like the leaves on the trees, they fall off at different times; they don’t all fall off at once.”Hockney with his dog, Tess.Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, © David Hockney.Hockney’s budding years took place in a working-class household in Bradford, a city in northern England. His father, a pacifist, was an accountant’s clerk; his mother, a devout Methodist and a vegetarian, tended the home. They recognized Hockney’s artistic talent and drive at an early age and, with some hesitation, bowed to his insistence that he forgo getting a job and instead attend the Bradford School of Art, a well-regarded institution. He received a first-class diploma with honors and was admitted for postgraduate work at both the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal College of Art, two of the most prestigious art schools in Britain. When he received his diploma from the Royal College of Art, in 1962, he already had been represented for a year by a dealer, John Kasmin, and was known in the London art world. Counter to the usual story of an artist clawing his way to recognition, he had to resist the temptation to rest on his laurels. By the time he was 40, he was a global celebrity.That is how old he was when I first spoke with him, in 1978, in his studio in the Notting Hill district of London. I was a young magazine journalist, interviewing him about the sets he was creating for a Glyndebourne Festival production of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. Looking back at my interview notes, I see that Hockney was already coping with the weight of his achievements. “It gets harder to paint as you go on, partly because you’ve got your own work of the past to think about,” he said then. “So, it’s both a burden and an advantage. And, of course, you always want to paint better pictures. Otherwise, you wouldn’t go on; you’d give up.”With that in mind, he had been revisiting some of his early paintings. At one point, he said, he had dismissed them as “awfully poor and inconsistent”—in short, “dreadful.” But then he saw them again at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1970 and revised his opinion. “You could see how I’d taken up some ideas and moved along with them and abandoned some and moved into other areas,” he said. “Obviously, great artists give you standards that you want to try and attempt to reach, but I’m not stupid. I can’t paint like Velázquez or Goya or Picasso. I would be mad to try. I just don’t have that kind of skill at all.”Hockney’s painting After Munch: Less Is Known Than People Think, 2023.Jonathan Wilkinson, © David Hockney.Despite his modesty, Hockney possesses draftsmanship skills that surpass those of most of his contemporaries. Plus, he has the advantage of being an artist of his time. Early on, he was able to soak up what other artists were doing—such as the shaped canvases of Frank Stella and Jasper Johns, and the color field ring abstractions of Kenneth Noland, which can be readily detected in his Royal College of Art paintings. “At one time, I believed my work had to look like modern art or it wasn’t any good,” he said in that conversation decades ago. “Then I slowly began to realize that was a silly way of looking at it. Art can’t go backwards. Even if everybody starts painting just what’s in front of them, they can’t paint the way it was done 50 years ago. It’s just not possible. Then you begin to realize, if this is an impossibility, there’s no use worrying about something you couldn’t avoid anyway.”Later, when living in Los Angeles, Hockney became obsessed with the challenge of conveying a sense of movement and the passage of time in a two-dimensional painting. In the 1980s, he started taking Polaroids to make bigger and bigger collages. He was seeking to emulate Cubism in undermining single-point perspective, which places a viewer in a static posture, facing a scene that recedes to a vanishing point. Treating photos as his building blocks, he constructed compositions that culminated in 1986 in Pearblossom Hwy., which comprises more than 700 -photographs to represent varying viewpoints that you would see from the front seat of a car while riding down a desert highway. In his paintings, too, he incorporated motion. Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio, from 1980, depicts a sinuous road that snakes through a scene of pointillist patchwork, in colors as bright as those of the Fauvists, juxtaposed with a section that has the bleached-out rectilinearity of a road map.Much of the work on view in Paris will reveal Hockney’s infatuation with the latest technologies. In late 2008, he began making drawings, initially of flowers, on his iPhone, a device that had been introduced only a year before. By then he had moved his primary residence from Los Angeles to a town called Bridlington, on the coast of East Yorkshire, about 80 miles from Bradford. “The reason I was good on the iPhone was that I always had quite small sketchbooks in my pocket, so with it being small, it didn’t matter to me that much,” he said. “I drew on the phone with my thumb mostly, and then I got a stylus. But the first ones, 30 or 40, were drawn with just a thumb.” He purchased an iPad in June 2010, as soon as it became available. Hockney had been stippling and crosshatching with ink on paper or acrylic paint on canvas, and the tablet allowed him a quicker, easier way to proceed. In Bridlington, he also returned to oil painting, inspired by the landscape, which he portrayed in acid greens and shocking mauves, similar to the colors on the prints made from his iPad drawings.Hockney at his reading table.Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, © David Hockney.When he made his next move, to a half-timbered 17th-century house in Normandy in 2019, with JP, who is French, he was comfortable shifting back and forth between iPad sketches, ink drawings, and paintings. In Normandy, he made a series of acrylic portraits of friends and relatives who came to visit: his brother Richard; the three adult children of the fashion designers Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell; record producer Clive Davis; and—surprisingly, because he dislikes painting portraits of people he hasn’t known for a long time—Harry Styles. Loose and relaxed, they exemplify what Hockney is aiming for at this point in his life. “My approach to portraiture has changed,” he told me. “Now I don’t really draw a preparatory sketch on the canvas. I just start painting, which is a bit riskier because wherever you put the head, the body has to fit. But I’m enjoying it, and I think most of the portraits are quite successful.”The Paris show is weighted toward his portraiture, and it pays primary attention to the paintings and drawings he produced in Bridlington and Normandy. But it will span the enormous arc of his career, beginning with the portrait he made of his father in Bradford in 1955, which was the first painting he sold. Some artists are daunted to see the scope of all they have created. It paralyzes them into uncertainty about where to make their next move. I asked Hockney, who has had so many retrospectives (including a gigantic one at Tate Britain and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when he turned 80 in 2017), whether that possibility worried him. He said that Sir Alan Bowness, a former director of Tate, once told him that many artists couldn’t work for months after such an exhibition. Hockney dismissed that fear with characteristic nonchalance. “Well, I just go on,” he told me. “I never bother.” Puckishly, he added, “Anyway, at my age now, I couldn’t really freeze.” Source link

[chilimili212]

An unrepentant lifetime smoker, David Hockney, 87, wheezes from respiratory difficulties. He sleeps during some of the day and is watched over by round-the-clock nurses. His deafness, the first signs of which he noticed in 1979, has worsened considerably, so that even with hearing aids he relies on lipreading to facilitate conversation. In July 2023, he moved to London from his house in rural Normandy, France, partly because he needed to be in close range of a hospital in case of an emergency.And yet, for three hours or so each day, Hockney marshals his energies to sit down and paint. Earlier this year, he was still making pictures to include in his largest exhibition to date, “David Hockney, 25,” a retrospective scheduled to open on April 9 at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, in Paris. Working with his companion, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, who is known as JP, Hockney has been instrumental in shaping the contours of the show.As the title indicates, “David Hockney, 25” will spotlight his 21st--century output, pictures he has made in the past 25 years. “He’s done a huge amount of work in that period,” says Sir Norman Rosenthal, former head of the Royal Academy of Arts, who is the Fondation’s guest curator. “He’s a kind of Picasso figure, in terms of the breadth and variety of concentration and the sheer production.” The exhibition will also include some earlier iconic works, among them A Bigger Splash (1967), Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1970–71), and Portrait of an -Artist (Pool With Two Figures) (1972)—the last of which sold in 2018 for $90.3 million, a price that remains the record at auction for a painting by a living artist.Hockney’s painting After Blake: Less Is Known Than People Think, 2024.Jonathan Wilkinson, © David Hockney.Like his hero, Picasso, Hockney has managed to create a prodigious quantity of acclaimed art while maintaining a public persona that enjoys brand-name recognition. A celebrity since his mid-20s, he dyed his dark hair blond and wore oversize round eyeglasses, guilelessly crafting a look that distinguished him from the crowd. Shunning plain clothes, he opted for checks, tattersalls, plaids, and, especially, stripes. His socks were brightly colored and mismatched. A cigarette was never far from his lips.Also like Picasso, he immortalized a succession of lovers in a multitude of portraits—only in Hockney’s case, the lovers are male. While a student at the Royal College of Art, in London, at a time when -homosexuality was still illegal in Britain, he depicted gay sexuality and domesticity with courageous insouciance. Back then, influenced by Jean Dubuffet, he was making blocky “art brut” figures—but Hockney’s boxy men were hugging and kissing (We Two Boys Together Clinging, 1961) or engaged in reciprocal fellatio (Adhesiveness, 1960). His life-study painting, a requirement for graduation, was inspired by a muscleman posing on the cover of a homoerotic physique magazine. Was he penalized? To the contrary, his paintings were praised in the press after being chosen in two consecutive years for the “Young Contemporaries” show in a London gallery. Upon graduation, he was awarded a gold medal of distinction with his diploma. He wore a gold lamé jacket to the ceremony.In 1974, Sir John Rothenstein, the longtime director of the Tate, wrote that Hockney “enjoyed an immediate, international success that began when he was still a student—something achieved by no serious painter within my earlier personal experience.” Through his beguiling personality as well as his talent, he entered elite social circles, making dear friends of Christopher Isherwood and Billy Wilder, and fraternizing with the likes of Andy Warhol, Paloma Picasso, Amanda Lear, Karl Lagerfeld, Tony Richardson, Dennis Hopper, Stephen Spender…the list goes on and on.Clockwise from top left: A portrait by Cecil Beaton, 1965; Hockney, with artists Raymond Foye (left) and Jerry Sohn, in front of a wall-size work, 1980; with the painting that won him the first prize at the John Moores National Museums Liverpool exhibition, 1967; Hockney, circa 1985; in Los Angeles, circa 1978; Hockney’s painting The Most Beautiful Boy in the World being hung at the Royal College of Art’s “Young Contemporaries” exhibition in London, 1961; the film poster for A Bigger Splash, 1973; at work in his studio, 1984; Mozart’s The Magic Flute, with sets designed by Hockney, 1987; with Peter Schlesinger on the set of A Bigger Splash; Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures), 1972. Clockwise from top left: Cecil Beaton, Condé Nast via Getty Images; Susan Wood/Getty Images; WATFORD/Mirrorpix/Mirrorpix via Getty Images; Michael Childers/Corbis via Getty Images; Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images; LMPC via Getty Images; Ron Bull/Toronto Star via Getty Images; Ron Scherl/Redferns; Moviestore/Shutterstock; Jenni Carter, © David Hockney; Corbis/VCG via Getty Images.He owes his popularity with a wider audience to his skill in constructing a fully inhabited and furnished universe. That was especially true of Los Angeles, which he, more than any other artist, has visually defined in the public’s imagination. He moved there in 1964, having idealized it—and painted it—beforehand, with an erotic aura he absorbed from reading Physique Pictorial and gay fiction. As he looked down from the airplane and saw the profusion of blue swimming pools, he knew he had found his home.Over the next decades, Hockney would depict L.A. as a collection of shimmering pools, towering palms, and low-slung modernist houses, all aglow in a flat bright light. And the city, in turn, would leave its mark on him. Before he arrived, he was painting people as heads atop rectangles. Beginning in 1966 with a painting of a friend, the gallerist Nick Wilder, he began doing portraits of specific people.In his personal life, he was teaching an art course at UCLA, and at the start of the term he fell for an 18-year-old student, Peter Schlesinger. Their five-year relationship was the first love of Hockney’s life. Its dissolution in 1971, chronicled with unusual intimacy in Jack Hazan’s semi-fictionalized documentary A Bigger Splash, left him bereft. He expressed his forlorn feelings in his work, most famously in Portrait of an Artist, with the artist being Schlesinger, who is standing at the edge of a pool and looking down at a man swimming.Clockwise from top left: Hockney’s Portrait of My Father, 1955; with his then partner, Peter Schlesinger, 1969; at home in Los Angeles, 1987; with his dog, circa 1999; poolside in Los Angeles with David Stoltz (left) and Ian Falconer, circa 1978; a painting of his current companion, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, 2013; with Celia Birtwell beside Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy, 1970–71; in the Hollywood Hills, circa 1978; his memoir David Hockney by David Hockney: My Early Years, 1988; with Paloma Picasso, 1984; Hockney’s painting Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, 1968; Cecil Beaton and Hockney, photographed by Schlesinger, 1970; with Keith Haring at Mr Chow restaurant, 1985.Clockwise from top left: Richard Schmidt, The David Hockney Foundation, © David Hockney; Chris Morphet/Redferns/Getty Images; Anthony Barboza/Getty Images; Mikel Roberts/Sygma via Getty Images; Michael Childers/Corbis via Getty Images; © David Hockney; Nick Harvey/WireImage; Michael Childers/Corbis via Getty Images; Abe Books; Alan Davidson/Shutterstock; Fabrice Gibert, © David Hockney; Peter Schlesinger; © Ben Buchanan, American Art Archives.For the most part, however, his portrayals of pools, especially in Los Angeles, were sunnier. In 1988, in the catalog for a Hockney retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, its director Earl A. Powell III wrote, “It is through Hockney’s work that many people derive their impressions of life in Southern California, a landscape redolent with sunshine, swimming pools, and palm trees.” That was 37 years ago. The smoke of the catastrophic L.A. wildfires was still fresh when I asked Hockney for his reaction to the devastation. He has two homes there, one in the Hollywood Hills and one in Malibu, on the beach. The golden dream of Southern California was now grievously smudged. “I lived in L.A. for 30 years, and I probably won’t go back now,” he told me, speaking through an associate who read him my questions. “Somebody said my little house on the beach survived because it was on rocks and you went up the steps to the wooden garages. And maybe it has. I don’t know. I am sure it must be a sadder place, L.A. right now.”But looking back feels unnatural to Hockney. He prefers to make new work that can be included in the upcoming show. In his latest self-portrait, he adopted a characteristic pose, seated in his garden, drawing a tree with one hand and holding a cigarette in the other. He has also made recent studies of his nurses, Lewis and Sonja. These paintings are tinged with the wistful tenderness that can come in old age to those fortunate enough to accept it gracefully. “I recently did Lewis and Sonja because I have got to know their faces, you see, because they are looking at me and I am looking at them,” he said. “Otherwise, you are not sure what people really look like. I know we are all different—everybody’s different. And like the leaves on the trees, they fall off at different times; they don’t all fall off at once.”Hockney with his dog, Tess.Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, © David Hockney.Hockney’s budding years took place in a working-class household in Bradford, a city in northern England. His father, a pacifist, was an accountant’s clerk; his mother, a devout Methodist and a vegetarian, tended the home. They recognized Hockney’s artistic talent and drive at an early age and, with some hesitation, bowed to his insistence that he forgo getting a job and instead attend the Bradford School of Art, a well-regarded institution. He received a first-class diploma with honors and was admitted for postgraduate work at both the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal College of Art, two of the most prestigious art schools in Britain. When he received his diploma from the Royal College of Art, in 1962, he already had been represented for a year by a dealer, John Kasmin, and was known in the London art world. Counter to the usual story of an artist clawing his way to recognition, he had to resist the temptation to rest on his laurels. By the time he was 40, he was a global celebrity.That is how old he was when I first spoke with him, in 1978, in his studio in the Notting Hill district of London. I was a young magazine journalist, interviewing him about the sets he was creating for a Glyndebourne Festival production of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. Looking back at my interview notes, I see that Hockney was already coping with the weight of his achievements. “It gets harder to paint as you go on, partly because you’ve got your own work of the past to think about,” he said then. “So, it’s both a burden and an advantage. And, of course, you always want to paint better pictures. Otherwise, you wouldn’t go on; you’d give up.”With that in mind, he had been revisiting some of his early paintings. At one point, he said, he had dismissed them as “awfully poor and inconsistent”—in short, “dreadful.” But then he saw them again at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1970 and revised his opinion. “You could see how I’d taken up some ideas and moved along with them and abandoned some and moved into other areas,” he said. “Obviously, great artists give you standards that you want to try and attempt to reach, but I’m not stupid. I can’t paint like Velázquez or Goya or Picasso. I would be mad to try. I just don’t have that kind of skill at all.”Hockney’s painting After Munch: Less Is Known Than People Think, 2023.Jonathan Wilkinson, © David Hockney.Despite his modesty, Hockney possesses draftsmanship skills that surpass those of most of his contemporaries. Plus, he has the advantage of being an artist of his time. Early on, he was able to soak up what other artists were doing—such as the shaped canvases of Frank Stella and Jasper Johns, and the color field ring abstractions of Kenneth Noland, which can be readily detected in his Royal College of Art paintings. “At one time, I believed my work had to look like modern art or it wasn’t any good,” he said in that conversation decades ago. “Then I slowly began to realize that was a silly way of looking at it. Art can’t go backwards. Even if everybody starts painting just what’s in front of them, they can’t paint the way it was done 50 years ago. It’s just not possible. Then you begin to realize, if this is an impossibility, there’s no use worrying about something you couldn’t avoid anyway.”Later, when living in Los Angeles, Hockney became obsessed with the challenge of conveying a sense of movement and the passage of time in a two-dimensional painting. In the 1980s, he started taking Polaroids to make bigger and bigger collages. He was seeking to emulate Cubism in undermining single-point perspective, which places a viewer in a static posture, facing a scene that recedes to a vanishing point. Treating photos as his building blocks, he constructed compositions that culminated in 1986 in Pearblossom Hwy., which comprises more than 700 -photographs to represent varying viewpoints that you would see from the front seat of a car while riding down a desert highway. In his paintings, too, he incorporated motion. Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio, from 1980, depicts a sinuous road that snakes through a scene of pointillist patchwork, in colors as bright as those of the Fauvists, juxtaposed with a section that has the bleached-out rectilinearity of a road map.Much of the work on view in Paris will reveal Hockney’s infatuation with the latest technologies. In late 2008, he began making drawings, initially of flowers, on his iPhone, a device that had been introduced only a year before. By then he had moved his primary residence from Los Angeles to a town called Bridlington, on the coast of East Yorkshire, about 80 miles from Bradford. “The reason I was good on the iPhone was that I always had quite small sketchbooks in my pocket, so with it being small, it didn’t matter to me that much,” he said. “I drew on the phone with my thumb mostly, and then I got a stylus. But the first ones, 30 or 40, were drawn with just a thumb.” He purchased an iPad in June 2010, as soon as it became available. Hockney had been stippling and crosshatching with ink on paper or acrylic paint on canvas, and the tablet allowed him a quicker, easier way to proceed. In Bridlington, he also returned to oil painting, inspired by the landscape, which he portrayed in acid greens and shocking mauves, similar to the colors on the prints made from his iPad drawings.Hockney at his reading table.Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, © David Hockney.When he made his next move, to a half-timbered 17th-century house in Normandy in 2019, with JP, who is French, he was comfortable shifting back and forth between iPad sketches, ink drawings, and paintings. In Normandy, he made a series of acrylic portraits of friends and relatives who came to visit: his brother Richard; the three adult children of the fashion designers Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell; record producer Clive Davis; and—surprisingly, because he dislikes painting portraits of people he hasn’t known for a long time—Harry Styles. Loose and relaxed, they exemplify what Hockney is aiming for at this point in his life. “My approach to portraiture has changed,” he told me. “Now I don’t really draw a preparatory sketch on the canvas. I just start painting, which is a bit riskier because wherever you put the head, the body has to fit. But I’m enjoying it, and I think most of the portraits are quite successful.”The Paris show is weighted toward his portraiture, and it pays primary attention to the paintings and drawings he produced in Bridlington and Normandy. But it will span the enormous arc of his career, beginning with the portrait he made of his father in Bradford in 1955, which was the first painting he sold. Some artists are daunted to see the scope of all they have created. It paralyzes them into uncertainty about where to make their next move. I asked Hockney, who has had so many retrospectives (including a gigantic one at Tate Britain and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when he turned 80 in 2017), whether that possibility worried him. He said that Sir Alan Bowness, a former director of Tate, once told him that many artists couldn’t work for months after such an exhibition. Hockney dismissed that fear with characteristic nonchalance. “Well, I just go on,” he told me. “I never bother.” Puckishly, he added, “Anyway, at my age now, I couldn’t really freeze.” Source link

[oliviajoyice21]

An unrepentant lifetime smoker, David Hockney, 87, wheezes from respiratory difficulties. He sleeps during some of the day and is watched over by round-the-clock nurses. His deafness, the first signs of which he noticed in 1979, has worsened considerably, so that even with hearing aids he relies on lipreading to facilitate conversation. In July 2023, he moved to London from his house in rural Normandy, France, partly because he needed to be in close range of a hospital in case of an emergency.And yet, for three hours or so each day, Hockney marshals his energies to sit down and paint. Earlier this year, he was still making pictures to include in his largest exhibition to date, “David Hockney, 25,” a retrospective scheduled to open on April 9 at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, in Paris. Working with his companion, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, who is known as JP, Hockney has been instrumental in shaping the contours of the show.As the title indicates, “David Hockney, 25” will spotlight his 21st--century output, pictures he has made in the past 25 years. “He’s done a huge amount of work in that period,” says Sir Norman Rosenthal, former head of the Royal Academy of Arts, who is the Fondation’s guest curator. “He’s a kind of Picasso figure, in terms of the breadth and variety of concentration and the sheer production.” The exhibition will also include some earlier iconic works, among them A Bigger Splash (1967), Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1970–71), and Portrait of an -Artist (Pool With Two Figures) (1972)—the last of which sold in 2018 for $90.3 million, a price that remains the record at auction for a painting by a living artist.Hockney’s painting After Blake: Less Is Known Than People Think, 2024.Jonathan Wilkinson, © David Hockney.Like his hero, Picasso, Hockney has managed to create a prodigious quantity of acclaimed art while maintaining a public persona that enjoys brand-name recognition. A celebrity since his mid-20s, he dyed his dark hair blond and wore oversize round eyeglasses, guilelessly crafting a look that distinguished him from the crowd. Shunning plain clothes, he opted for checks, tattersalls, plaids, and, especially, stripes. His socks were brightly colored and mismatched. A cigarette was never far from his lips.Also like Picasso, he immortalized a succession of lovers in a multitude of portraits—only in Hockney’s case, the lovers are male. While a student at the Royal College of Art, in London, at a time when -homosexuality was still illegal in Britain, he depicted gay sexuality and domesticity with courageous insouciance. Back then, influenced by Jean Dubuffet, he was making blocky “art brut” figures—but Hockney’s boxy men were hugging and kissing (We Two Boys Together Clinging, 1961) or engaged in reciprocal fellatio (Adhesiveness, 1960). His life-study painting, a requirement for graduation, was inspired by a muscleman posing on the cover of a homoerotic physique magazine. Was he penalized? To the contrary, his paintings were praised in the press after being chosen in two consecutive years for the “Young Contemporaries” show in a London gallery. Upon graduation, he was awarded a gold medal of distinction with his diploma. He wore a gold lamé jacket to the ceremony.In 1974, Sir John Rothenstein, the longtime director of the Tate, wrote that Hockney “enjoyed an immediate, international success that began when he was still a student—something achieved by no serious painter within my earlier personal experience.” Through his beguiling personality as well as his talent, he entered elite social circles, making dear friends of Christopher Isherwood and Billy Wilder, and fraternizing with the likes of Andy Warhol, Paloma Picasso, Amanda Lear, Karl Lagerfeld, Tony Richardson, Dennis Hopper, Stephen Spender…the list goes on and on.Clockwise from top left: A portrait by Cecil Beaton, 1965; Hockney, with artists Raymond Foye (left) and Jerry Sohn, in front of a wall-size work, 1980; with the painting that won him the first prize at the John Moores National Museums Liverpool exhibition, 1967; Hockney, circa 1985; in Los Angeles, circa 1978; Hockney’s painting The Most Beautiful Boy in the World being hung at the Royal College of Art’s “Young Contemporaries” exhibition in London, 1961; the film poster for A Bigger Splash, 1973; at work in his studio, 1984; Mozart’s The Magic Flute, with sets designed by Hockney, 1987; with Peter Schlesinger on the set of A Bigger Splash; Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures), 1972. Clockwise from top left: Cecil Beaton, Condé Nast via Getty Images; Susan Wood/Getty Images; WATFORD/Mirrorpix/Mirrorpix via Getty Images; Michael Childers/Corbis via Getty Images; Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images; LMPC via Getty Images; Ron Bull/Toronto Star via Getty Images; Ron Scherl/Redferns; Moviestore/Shutterstock; Jenni Carter, © David Hockney; Corbis/VCG via Getty Images.He owes his popularity with a wider audience to his skill in constructing a fully inhabited and furnished universe. That was especially true of Los Angeles, which he, more than any other artist, has visually defined in the public’s imagination. He moved there in 1964, having idealized it—and painted it—beforehand, with an erotic aura he absorbed from reading Physique Pictorial and gay fiction. As he looked down from the airplane and saw the profusion of blue swimming pools, he knew he had found his home.Over the next decades, Hockney would depict L.A. as a collection of shimmering pools, towering palms, and low-slung modernist houses, all aglow in a flat bright light. And the city, in turn, would leave its mark on him. Before he arrived, he was painting people as heads atop rectangles. Beginning in 1966 with a painting of a friend, the gallerist Nick Wilder, he began doing portraits of specific people.In his personal life, he was teaching an art course at UCLA, and at the start of the term he fell for an 18-year-old student, Peter Schlesinger. Their five-year relationship was the first love of Hockney’s life. Its dissolution in 1971, chronicled with unusual intimacy in Jack Hazan’s semi-fictionalized documentary A Bigger Splash, left him bereft. He expressed his forlorn feelings in his work, most famously in Portrait of an Artist, with the artist being Schlesinger, who is standing at the edge of a pool and looking down at a man swimming.Clockwise from top left: Hockney’s Portrait of My Father, 1955; with his then partner, Peter Schlesinger, 1969; at home in Los Angeles, 1987; with his dog, circa 1999; poolside in Los Angeles with David Stoltz (left) and Ian Falconer, circa 1978; a painting of his current companion, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, 2013; with Celia Birtwell beside Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy, 1970–71; in the Hollywood Hills, circa 1978; his memoir David Hockney by David Hockney: My Early Years, 1988; with Paloma Picasso, 1984; Hockney’s painting Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, 1968; Cecil Beaton and Hockney, photographed by Schlesinger, 1970; with Keith Haring at Mr Chow restaurant, 1985.Clockwise from top left: Richard Schmidt, The David Hockney Foundation, © David Hockney; Chris Morphet/Redferns/Getty Images; Anthony Barboza/Getty Images; Mikel Roberts/Sygma via Getty Images; Michael Childers/Corbis via Getty Images; © David Hockney; Nick Harvey/WireImage; Michael Childers/Corbis via Getty Images; Abe Books; Alan Davidson/Shutterstock; Fabrice Gibert, © David Hockney; Peter Schlesinger; © Ben Buchanan, American Art Archives.For the most part, however, his portrayals of pools, especially in Los Angeles, were sunnier. In 1988, in the catalog for a Hockney retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, its director Earl A. Powell III wrote, “It is through Hockney’s work that many people derive their impressions of life in Southern California, a landscape redolent with sunshine, swimming pools, and palm trees.” That was 37 years ago. The smoke of the catastrophic L.A. wildfires was still fresh when I asked Hockney for his reaction to the devastation. He has two homes there, one in the Hollywood Hills and one in Malibu, on the beach. The golden dream of Southern California was now grievously smudged. “I lived in L.A. for 30 years, and I probably won’t go back now,” he told me, speaking through an associate who read him my questions. “Somebody said my little house on the beach survived because it was on rocks and you went up the steps to the wooden garages. And maybe it has. I don’t know. I am sure it must be a sadder place, L.A. right now.”But looking back feels unnatural to Hockney. He prefers to make new work that can be included in the upcoming show. In his latest self-portrait, he adopted a characteristic pose, seated in his garden, drawing a tree with one hand and holding a cigarette in the other. He has also made recent studies of his nurses, Lewis and Sonja. These paintings are tinged with the wistful tenderness that can come in old age to those fortunate enough to accept it gracefully. “I recently did Lewis and Sonja because I have got to know their faces, you see, because they are looking at me and I am looking at them,” he said. “Otherwise, you are not sure what people really look like. I know we are all different—everybody’s different. And like the leaves on the trees, they fall off at different times; they don’t all fall off at once.”Hockney with his dog, Tess.Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, © David Hockney.Hockney’s budding years took place in a working-class household in Bradford, a city in northern England. His father, a pacifist, was an accountant’s clerk; his mother, a devout Methodist and a vegetarian, tended the home. They recognized Hockney’s artistic talent and drive at an early age and, with some hesitation, bowed to his insistence that he forgo getting a job and instead attend the Bradford School of Art, a well-regarded institution. He received a first-class diploma with honors and was admitted for postgraduate work at both the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal College of Art, two of the most prestigious art schools in Britain. When he received his diploma from the Royal College of Art, in 1962, he already had been represented for a year by a dealer, John Kasmin, and was known in the London art world. Counter to the usual story of an artist clawing his way to recognition, he had to resist the temptation to rest on his laurels. By the time he was 40, he was a global celebrity.That is how old he was when I first spoke with him, in 1978, in his studio in the Notting Hill district of London. I was a young magazine journalist, interviewing him about the sets he was creating for a Glyndebourne Festival production of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. Looking back at my interview notes, I see that Hockney was already coping with the weight of his achievements. “It gets harder to paint as you go on, partly because you’ve got your own work of the past to think about,” he said then. “So, it’s both a burden and an advantage. And, of course, you always want to paint better pictures. Otherwise, you wouldn’t go on; you’d give up.”With that in mind, he had been revisiting some of his early paintings. At one point, he said, he had dismissed them as “awfully poor and inconsistent”—in short, “dreadful.” But then he saw them again at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1970 and revised his opinion. “You could see how I’d taken up some ideas and moved along with them and abandoned some and moved into other areas,” he said. “Obviously, great artists give you standards that you want to try and attempt to reach, but I’m not stupid. I can’t paint like Velázquez or Goya or Picasso. I would be mad to try. I just don’t have that kind of skill at all.”Hockney’s painting After Munch: Less Is Known Than People Think, 2023.Jonathan Wilkinson, © David Hockney.Despite his modesty, Hockney possesses draftsmanship skills that surpass those of most of his contemporaries. Plus, he has the advantage of being an artist of his time. Early on, he was able to soak up what other artists were doing—such as the shaped canvases of Frank Stella and Jasper Johns, and the color field ring abstractions of Kenneth Noland, which can be readily detected in his Royal College of Art paintings. “At one time, I believed my work had to look like modern art or it wasn’t any good,” he said in that conversation decades ago. “Then I slowly began to realize that was a silly way of looking at it. Art can’t go backwards. Even if everybody starts painting just what’s in front of them, they can’t paint the way it was done 50 years ago. It’s just not possible. Then you begin to realize, if this is an impossibility, there’s no use worrying about something you couldn’t avoid anyway.”Later, when living in Los Angeles, Hockney became obsessed with the challenge of conveying a sense of movement and the passage of time in a two-dimensional painting. In the 1980s, he started taking Polaroids to make bigger and bigger collages. He was seeking to emulate Cubism in undermining single-point perspective, which places a viewer in a static posture, facing a scene that recedes to a vanishing point. Treating photos as his building blocks, he constructed compositions that culminated in 1986 in Pearblossom Hwy., which comprises more than 700 -photographs to represent varying viewpoints that you would see from the front seat of a car while riding down a desert highway. In his paintings, too, he incorporated motion. Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio, from 1980, depicts a sinuous road that snakes through a scene of pointillist patchwork, in colors as bright as those of the Fauvists, juxtaposed with a section that has the bleached-out rectilinearity of a road map.Much of the work on view in Paris will reveal Hockney’s infatuation with the latest technologies. In late 2008, he began making drawings, initially of flowers, on his iPhone, a device that had been introduced only a year before. By then he had moved his primary residence from Los Angeles to a town called Bridlington, on the coast of East Yorkshire, about 80 miles from Bradford. “The reason I was good on the iPhone was that I always had quite small sketchbooks in my pocket, so with it being small, it didn’t matter to me that much,” he said. “I drew on the phone with my thumb mostly, and then I got a stylus. But the first ones, 30 or 40, were drawn with just a thumb.” He purchased an iPad in June 2010, as soon as it became available. Hockney had been stippling and crosshatching with ink on paper or acrylic paint on canvas, and the tablet allowed him a quicker, easier way to proceed. In Bridlington, he also returned to oil painting, inspired by the landscape, which he portrayed in acid greens and shocking mauves, similar to the colors on the prints made from his iPad drawings.Hockney at his reading table.Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, © David Hockney.When he made his next move, to a half-timbered 17th-century house in Normandy in 2019, with JP, who is French, he was comfortable shifting back and forth between iPad sketches, ink drawings, and paintings. In Normandy, he made a series of acrylic portraits of friends and relatives who came to visit: his brother Richard; the three adult children of the fashion designers Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell; record producer Clive Davis; and—surprisingly, because he dislikes painting portraits of people he hasn’t known for a long time—Harry Styles. Loose and relaxed, they exemplify what Hockney is aiming for at this point in his life. “My approach to portraiture has changed,” he told me. “Now I don’t really draw a preparatory sketch on the canvas. I just start painting, which is a bit riskier because wherever you put the head, the body has to fit. But I’m enjoying it, and I think most of the portraits are quite successful.”The Paris show is weighted toward his portraiture, and it pays primary attention to the paintings and drawings he produced in Bridlington and Normandy. But it will span the enormous arc of his career, beginning with the portrait he made of his father in Bradford in 1955, which was the first painting he sold. Some artists are daunted to see the scope of all they have created. It paralyzes them into uncertainty about where to make their next move. I asked Hockney, who has had so many retrospectives (including a gigantic one at Tate Britain and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when he turned 80 in 2017), whether that possibility worried him. He said that Sir Alan Bowness, a former director of Tate, once told him that many artists couldn’t work for months after such an exhibition. Hockney dismissed that fear with characteristic nonchalance. “Well, I just go on,” he told me. “I never bother.” Puckishly, he added, “Anyway, at my age now, I couldn’t really freeze.” Source link