The amazing, openly-gay artist David Hockney, whose vibrant portraits and sun-drenched depictions of the everyday made him one of contemporary art’s most beloved figures, has died at 88.

The artist died “peacefully at home” on Thursday, one month short of his 89th birthday, according to a statement provided to CNN by his longtime publicist Erica Bolton.

Born in Bradford, UK, in 1937, Hockney attended his local art school before studying at the prestigious Royal College of Art in London. Successful from the earliest stages of his career, he soon relocated to Los Angeles, where he would spend much of the 1960s and eventually settle.

While teaching at various US colleges, he established himself as a key figure in the Pop Art movement. Like many of his contemporaries, Hockney injected his work with bright colors and dancing lines. But while the likes of Andy Warhol (who was just nine years his senior) turned their focus to commercialism and consumer society, Hockney appeared more concerned with his immediate surroundings.

His deeply personal realist style was characterized by self-portraits, still lives and depictions of friends and lovers (and, later, his dachshunds Stanley and Boodgie, whom he immortalized in a series of paintings and an accompanying book). Having come out as gay in his early 20s — a time when homosexuality was still outlawed in England — he also explored sexuality through playfully explicit images and almost mundane snapshots of domestic life: men showering or quietly sitting together.
RIP Mr. Hockney. And check out his yellow crocs and patterned suit in this picture, taken toward the end of his life.
He made his life a work of art.