David Hockney’s move from London to Los Angeles in the early 1960s changed the way he saw the world. California light altered his understanding of colour, and with it came the images that made him instantly recognisable: swimming pools, modernist villas, palm trees and sharp shadows.

That matters now because Hockney’s pictures remain so familiar they have almost become part of the weather of modern life. Born in Bradford, U.K., in 1937, he grew up in a modest working-class family, with an accountant father who was a committed pacifist, and he carried that background into an outlook that never settled comfortably inside the academy. He once refused to take the written examination required for graduation from art school, a small act of defiance that fits the larger shape of his career.

The California years produced the work most people still associate with him. In 1967, he painted A Bigger Splash, showing a modern house, a still swimming pool and the splash left behind by something that has entered the water. It is a picture of ease and sunshine, but not a simple one. His paintings can feel calm and familiar at first glance, and yet there is often something uncanny in them, a coolness that makes them feel emotionally empty even as they look so open and bright.

That is part of why Hockney still holds attention. He was never simply a painter, and the breadth of his work helped turn those California scenes into collective visual culture rather than just a private style. What remains unclosed is the exact moment when he refused that art-school examination and how it affected his graduation, but the larger answer is already clear: the move to Los Angeles did not just change his subjects, it gave him the visual language that would define him.