‘An evangelist for joy’: David Hockney remembered by Rachel Whiteread, Jeremy Deller and more

Artists and cultural figures celebrate the great Yorkshire painter who could ‘make teabags and toothpaste glamorous’ – with a poem from a fellow Yorkshireman ‘David Hockney caught the look of the modern world’ David Hockney, revolutionary British artist, dies aged 88 My earliest memories of modern artists were of David Hockney, Andy Warhol and Bridget Riley. I remember seeing a TV programme about David in the 1970s as a young kid and thinking “wow, is that what being an artist is like?” Because my mum was an artist but she wasn’t anything like that! Compared with Bridget Riley, who was very sort of cool, David seemed out there, embracing it all. He was charismatic and fashionable and very out and proud. He made being an artist look fun. I don’t know if it always is that fun, but he made it look that way. I actually think about him every time I go swimming. And I swim a lot. I might be diving to the bottom of a pool or looking up from the bottom, and it always astounds me how he painted water, and figures within water. The multitudes of layering and light and depth. Those LA swimming pool paintings were like such an alien landscape compared with cold, dreary London