Remembering David Hockney: Inside the Homes and Studios That Shaped His Art

David Hockney’s Studios: His Total Work of Art

For David Hockney, the studio has never been merely a workspace. It is an extension of the mind, an inner landscape where memory, vision, and creative freedom overlap. Throughout his career, the artist’s studios have followed his geographical and emotional journeys, transforming each time into devices through which to observe the world – and reinvent it.

English artist David Hockney works on a painting in his studio, as two unidentified people sit in the background, 1980. (Photo by Susan Wood/Getty Images)

Susan Wood/Getty Images

From Yorkshire to California, each studio tells a different story of his artistic journey. His frequent returns to Bridlington, the coastal town where he grew up, prompted him to establish a workspace there to paint the Yorkshire landscapes he loved so much: countryside bathed in light, winding roads, trees, and seasons observed with almost meditative attention. More than a nostalgic refuge, that first studio represented a return to the origins of his gaze. When he moved to the Hollywood Hills in 1978, Hockney instead kept his creative hub further down, along Santa Monica Boulevard, inside a former industrial warehouse converted into a studio. In that rough, open space, much of his Californian output took shape: swimming pools, sun-drenched interiors, domestic perspectives, and visual experiments that defined the imagery of Hockney’s Los Angeles. Later, the artist even went so far as to convert a large game room adjacent to his home into a new studio. A gesture that speaks volumes about his ability to reinvent spaces and bend them to his own idea of painting: for Hockney, the studio need not be monumental or canonical, but alive, changeable, and traversable.

English artist David Hockney works on a large painting of a street scene, in his studio, 1980. (Photo by Susan Wood/Getty Images)

Susan Wood/Getty Images

His proximity to the great masters also played a fundamental role in the construction of his creative universe. In a later period, his London studio was in fact located near the Louvre Museum, a museum he frequented regularly to engage with classical painting. A constant dialogue with art history that continues to emerge in his most recent works, where technology, tradition, and memory coexist without hierarchy. This idea of the studio as a mental space perhaps reaches its most explicit form in the 2025 retrospective David Hockney 25 at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the largest ever dedicated to the artist, with over 400 works on display. On the top floor, his studio is reconstructed as a sort of symbolic ballroom: not a simple physical replica, but an immersive space where the public ideally enters the artist’s creative flow, amid images, memories, and fragments of life.

Hockney’s entire philosophy seems encapsulated in a phrase he has often repeated over the years: “I paint what I want to paint, when I want and where I want”. His studios, too, reflect this absolute freedom: open, fluid, personal spaces where painting becomes a way of inhabiting time and space.