David Hockney, who rocketed into the art-world pantheon with exuberant landscapes, evocative portraits, and vivid paintings of swimming pools, died at 88, reports National Review Online.

His depictions of familiar images, often made in a palette of bright acrylics, earned him the mantle of one of the fathers of British pop art. But Hockney didn’t ally himself with the movement—or any other—insisting that his vast oeuvre hinged simply on “looking, always looking.”

From David Hockney in 2019:

“The world is very, very beautiful, if you look at it, but most people don’t look very much, do they? They scan the ground in front of them so they can walk, but they don’t really look at things, incredibly well, with an intensity…I do.”