Creativity Quote by David Hockney

It lands like a throwaway line, but it’s a whole biography compressed into a joke about paperwork and belonging. Hockney treats “brought up” as something you can claim in more than one place, as if childhood were a passport stamp you collect. That casual doubling - Bradford and Hollywood - is the point: he’s refusing the tidy origin story that British culture loves to impose on its exported talent.

Bradford signals class, grit, and provincial England; Hollywood signals the constructed, luminous unreality of American image-making. By putting them on the same grammatical footing, Hockney collapses the usual hierarchy where the small northern city is “real” and Hollywood is “fake.” For an artist whose work obsesses over how we see - the staged swimming pool, the theatrical light, the camera’s lies - that collapse is a worldview. Identity, like perspective, can be re-engineered.

The subtext is also defensive and slyly political. In Britain, “where you’re from” can be an interrogation: accent as social sorting, hometown as destiny. Hockney answers with a quip that dodges the trap. He’s not denying Bradford; he’s expanding it. “Hollywood” becomes less a place than a training in surfaces: celebrity culture, cinema’s color palette, the idea that art can be bright without being shallow.

Context matters: Hockney came of age when queer lives and modern art both required strategic self-invention. The line reads like an artist insisting he wasn’t simply discovered or rescued by America; he was, in part, raised by its visual language. That’s not rootlessness. It’s a chosen lineage.