RIP David Hockney, Cannabis Legalization Supporter

"Pearblossom Highway," David Hockney photocollage, 1986

British-born, California-residing artist David Hockney has died at age 88, making him another long-living, productive marijuana smoker. 

His death came nine months after the close of a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, reports the NY Times. "But even at that point, he was not finished. Working out of his studio in London, using a wheelchair, his health failing, he continued to paint." Best known for his poolside scenes and double portraits that celebrated the Southern California sunlight, Hockney worked in many media, including photography and iPads. 

Born in 1937, the year marijuana was effectively made illegal in the US, Hockney earned a scholarship to a local art school at a young age and in 1959, he enrolled at the Royal College of Art in London. Seeing a major Picasso exhibition at the Tate Gallery the following year cemented his interest in art, and cubism (which was developed after Picasso tried cannabis). 

Hockney came out as gay when he was 23, seven years before Britain decriminalized homosexual acts. He took the occasion of his exhibit at London's Royal Academy of Arts in the summer of 1999 to call for the legalization of marijuana. "I remember Jack Straw [UK's home minister] in 1968 saying 'you can't legalise marijuana as we haven't got enough information'. Thirty years later, he's said exactly the same thing. I don't know what life has taught him, I've learnt quite a lot. I've smoked a lot of marijuana. It hasn't harmed me."

The artist said he smoked a regular "joint" with a glass of whiskey in the evening. But, he hastened to add, he had never indulged in stimulants when working because "drugs and art don't mix…You have to be very clear-headed." Drugs made you "too pleased with everything," he said, and to create great work "you have to struggle." (Source: Dalya Alberge, HOCKNEY SAYS DRUGS ARE FINE BUT NOT FOR ART, The Times (UK), May 27, 1999.) 

"He is a big supporter of California’s decision to legalise cannabis," says a 2020 The Times article that interviewed Hockney saying, “I always assumed they kept marijuana illegal because of the power of the alcohol lobby. That’s their competition. But the alcohol lobby has become less powerful, and of course there are lots of people now in their seventies or eighties who’ve smoked marijuana for 40 or 50 years. And they know it’s harmless.” He told The Times he smokes it himself, "not when he works, but in the evening to relax." Reportedly, he had a California Medical Marijuana card. He was also a chain cigarette smoker and staunch pro-tobacco campaigner. In 2005, he fought to stop a ban on smoking in pubs and restaurants. 

The Student: Homage to Picasso (1973)
David Hockney 

Hockney is partly responsible for my leaving my hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for California. I saw him give a lecture in Pittsburgh one night in the early 1980s where in charmingly humble fashion, he told an amusing anecdote about his breakthrough photocollage technique, a sort of photographic cubism he invented. You see, he explained, when we look at something we don't frame it as a professional photographer does, but rather look at that face, those eyes, that flower...moving our eyes across the scene and assembling it in our minds' eyes into a whole. 

He started taking pictures in just that way, leading to his Brooklyn Bridge photocollage gracing the cover of the New York Times magazine, or his fantastic California-based Pearblossom Highway (shown above). But before he was known for the form, the artist—who already had paintings in all the major art museums of the world—sent his photos to a drug store developing lab for processing. "And they'd send them back with little stickers on them telling me the proper way to frame a photograph," he said (in paraphrase). 

I thought after hearing him speak, "If he likes living in California, I think I would too." When I got to LA, the first ad agency (Chiat Day) I went into on my quest for gainful employment had a Hockney photocollage hanging in its lobby. I nearly forgot to hand the receptionist my resume in my excitement. Last year when I finally found a home of my own in Northern CA, a print on the hallway wall of Hockney's Garrowby Hill confirmed I was in the right place. 

The David Hockney Foundation was created by the artist in 2008, with the mission to advance appreciation and understanding of visual art and culture through the exhibition, preservation, and publication of Hockney's work. Richard Benefield, who organized "David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition" from 2013 to 2014 at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, became the first executive director in January 2017.

UPDATE: Mick Jagger tweeted: "Remembering David Hockney, he was kind and always had a sparkle in his eye. He never stopped experimenting and is one of the finest painters of our generation."