Ash trays are at half-mast as the art world mourns the passing of one its finest and most innovative smokers, David Hockney, who has died at the age of 88.
He died at home his publicist said, one cigarette short of his 89th that day.
As a smoker Hockney always went his own way, famously rejecting a knighthood for services to tobacco and sticking to his quiet habit when others chose healthier routes.
In 2018, one of his swimming pool paintings, 'Portrait of an Artist', sold for nearly £70m at auction, a record for a living artist and enough to keep him in roll-ups “until the next century”, he noted with his trademark grin.
But smoking didn’t come naturally to him. It was something he had to work at as a young lad growing up in Bradford. His first break came when he took a job as a paperboy for his local corner shop. “I saw people smoking as they walked to work and occasionally, they dropped a cigarette and that’s how I got the habit. I started sketching around this time as well, and the two seemed to go together.”
His love of smoking influenced his work too. One of his giant forest paintings has cigarette papers hidden among the leaves, and Ship matches are to produce a commemorative box featuring his image and miniatures of his two most famous paintings, ‘Ash’ and ‘A Bigger Ash’.
