“Artist David Hockney was a driver: After visiting and then moving to Los Angeles in 1964, he’d zip around the Hollywood Hills in his red 450 SL Mercedes, perhaps to Chateau Marmont, his spot in Malibu or the studio at multimedia workshop Gemini G.E.L. on Santa Monica Boulevard.
“For David in the 1960s, Los Angeles was an enigma — a unique city different from his native London or even from New York City where he had his first encounter with ‘America,’” says his close friend and fellow artist Doug E. Roberts.
The drives were a way not only to catalog the landscapes he would later paint but also to understand the way the sun affected the visual identity of the city. “Southern California has a different light than any place he had ever visited,” Roberts says…”
[Read the full article at latimes.com]