Soon after he moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s, the artist David Hockney was visited by his mother. As they drove back from the airport, far from her native Bradford, she gazed about her in apparent awe at the beauties of sun-kissed southern California. Then, as Hockney was fond of recalling, she turned and said: “I don’t understand it. Such lovely drying weather and no one’s got their washing out.” Mrs Hockney thus joined Mrs Warhol and Alan Bennett’s “Mam” as working-class mothers who delighted in their son’s success without ever quite understanding it.

Hockney, who has died aged 88, had been similarly awestruck when he first went to California in 1963, commissioned to make work for a show in New York. His response, though, was quite different. Looking down from a Pan Am jet, he marvelled at the blue glint of swimming pools and thought, “My God, this place needs its Piranesi.”

His first Californian picture, Plastic Tree Plus City Hall, celebrated the artificiality of Los Angeles – what the critic Robert Hughes called its role as “a flat, glaring, over-lit, antiseptic madhouse”. It also did so in artificial paint, the plastic-based acrylic that Hockney now used seriously for the first time.

Acrylic allowed for brighter saturations of colour than had traditional oil paints while doing away with surface texture. It was the perfect medium for capturing that signifier of a shallow world, the dappled surface of a chlorinated pool.

Back in London the following year, at his flat in Powis Square, Notting Hill, Hockney set to work on Picture of a Hollywood Swimming Pool, based on drawings he had made in California. Pushed up flat against the picture plane, the work’s blue-on-white squiggled surface looks merely pretty, poster-like. Like the artist who made it, though, its frivolity is deceptive. Picture of a Hollywood Swimming Pool is a polished, late-modernist work, its interplay of surface and depth consciously drawing on its maker’s knowledge of Matisse and Cézanne.

It was to be the forerunner of a body of work that, 60 years later, remains Hockney’s best known: paintings such as Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool (1966), centred on the tan-lined bare bottom of the artist’s then partner, the Californian student Peter Schlesinger. These works would culminate, in 1967, in the image that is still Hockney’s most famous, lending its name to Jack Hazan’s 1973 semi-fictionalised biopic of the artist: A Bigger Splash.

Square and white-bordered, the 8ft x 8ft canvas, now in Tate Britain, mimics the Polaroid snapshot on which it was based, the better to claim its own status as a painting.

When Hockney had arrived at the Royal College of Art just a few years before, in 1959, after a national diploma in design at Bradford College of Art followed by two years of alternative service (Hockney, like his father, was a conscientious objector) it was a feverish place at a febrile time. Recent graduates included Peter Blake, Frank Auerbach and Bridget Riley. Hockney’s particular admiration was for an older American called Ron Kitaj, better known as RB. It was Kitaj who suggested the subject of his first London paintings, Hockney being at the time a militant vegetarian. “I handed out leaflets about the cruelty involved in making the terrible sausages you got in the common room,” he remembered. “At Kitaj’s suggestion, I started painting vegetarian propaganda pictures and they became absurd and interesting.”

The older man’s magic lay in his nationality. Like most students at the RCA – and, indeed, like most postwar Britons – Hockney was fascinated by the US: Kitaj’s speciality at the time was proto-pop paintings of American motorcyclists and film stars. He also introduced the young Yorkshireman to Walt Whitman, whose poems of gay love would inspire a series of works Hockney called the Love Paintings. One, described by its new owner as “an indecent picture”, was bought by the photographer Cecil Beaton. Whitman’s verse was also the source of Hockney’s best-known college piece, a more-or-less openly homoerotic canvas called We Two Boys Together Clinging. Unusually, this had begun life as an etching. The influence of graphic art would remain central to Hockney’s painting.

Awarded the RCA’s gold medal by Richard Hamilton in 1961 (“David looked fine in his gold lamé jacket,” his proud mother wrote) Hockney was by now the college star. His work hogged reviews of that year’s Young Contemporaries show in London, catching the eye of the gallerist Paul Kasmin, who proposed himself as his promoter. With Kasmin’s backing, Hockney flew to New York on 9 July 1961, his 24th birthday. There, he saw a television advertisement for Lady Clairol hair dye, its slogan “Is it true blondes have more fun?” He returned to London a blond, in which guise he appeared, photographed by Lord Snowdon and alongside Francis Bacon, in the Sunday Times’s new magazine the following June.

The 60s had taken Hockney to the US and stardom, but the decade that followed would be marked by loss. He had, for a time, been the lover of the couturier Ossie Clark; when Clark married the fabric designer Celia Birtwell, in 1969, Hockney was the pair’s best man. His portrait of them, made as a wedding present, is full of foreboding. Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970-71), painted contre-jour, looks like the depiction of an idealised couple. It is, in reality, a problem painting, peppered with ominous hints and clues.

If Clark has the couple’s cat, Blanche, in his lap, the one in the picture’s title is Percy, slang for penis. Reversing the traditional order of wedding portraits, Clark sits while his wife stands; Hockney remains a presence in their life, in the form of one of the etchings from his early 60s series, The Rake’s Progress, hanging on a wall to the left. (These would feed into his set design for Stravinsky’s opera of the same name at Glyndebourne in 1975.) By 1974, Clark’s marriage was over, as was Hockney’s friendship with him.

All this was a far cry from Hockney’s early life. Born in Bradford, the fourth child of Laura (nee Thompson) and Kenneth Hockney, David had been raised in a back-to-back terrace house. Both of his parents had artistic leanings – Laura had been a pattern-maker in a firm of drapers, Ken was a keen photographer – but life in Steadman Terrace was nonetheless drab.

The elder Hockneys were strict Methodists, high-minded and teetotal; Laura was a vegetarian, Kenneth a pacifist. While his relationship with his parents remained close to the end of their lives, for their third son California was to be everything that Bradford was not.

Signs of his talent emerged early. To the annoyance of his brothers, three-year-old David would draw on their comics. When that was forbidden, he chalked pictures on the kitchen linoleum floor. It was watching his father at work on the old prams he restored for a living that opened David’s eyes to paint. “He had a special brush and he would hold his finger along the brush so he could paint a perfect line,” he recalled. “I thought: incredible that you can make a straight line like that with just your eye. It’s like watching Michelangelo draw a circle.”

The Hockneys were ambitious for their children. From Wellington Road primary, David followed his brothers on a scholarship to the revered Bradford grammar school. His parents were delighted, their son less so. Art at the grammar school was for less clever boys; the scholarship stream was allowed one period a week, the bottom class could study it to A-level. Accordingly, Hockney set about failing, swiftly falling from first in his class of 30 to 30th. When his ploy was discovered, Laura paid for him to have lessons in calligraphy from an artist neighbour. Hockney would count this early grounding in graphics as key to his later work.

His second discovery, arriving at Bradford College of Art in 1953, would be colour. This was a day of kitchen-sink realism in British art, characterised by Hockney’s older contemporary John Bratby as a mood “of ration books, sackcloth and ashes – introvert, grim, khaki”.

A lithograph made at the end of Hockney’s first year shows him bucking this trend. A self-portrait, it shows the artist-to-be on a red plush chair set in front of a wall tricked out in yellow paper, his hair already shaped in the pudding-bowl cut that would become his trademark. His first painted portrait reverts to the older, Sickertian palette favoured at Bradford. “What you were really concerned about was tonal values,” Hockney recalled. “This meant you ignored colour. Colour was not a subject of painting in that school.” Nonetheless, Portrait of My Father (1955) was to be his first sale, fetching £10 from a show of Yorkshire art at the Leeds Art Gallery. Told the news, Hockney rang Laura and said, “Hello, Mum, I’ve sold my Dad.”

Hockney continued to paint his parents over the next quarter of a century, flying them over to Paris to sit for him in the mid-70s after he had moved there to get over his break-up with Schlesinger. The result was a trio of French double portraits of which My Parents and Myself (1975) and My Parents (1977) survive.

In the former, the artist appears between Laura and Ken, reflected in a mirror in the manner of Velázquez’s Las Meninas. Hockney found the image unsatisfactory: it was taken home to Los Angeles and left there, unseen, until its reappearance in an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2020.

By contrast, My Parents was bought by Tate in 1981 and has been on show ever since. It is a work suffused with nostalgia, focusing on Laura’s slippered feet and Ken’s homely absorption in a book. It would be Hockney’s last portrait of his father, who died in 1979, although he would go on painting and drawing his mother: vulnerable, in reed pen, on the day of Ken’s funeral; asleep in her bed in 1996, arthritic hands twisted in pain. Her son was with her in the Yorkshire seaside town of Bridlington when she died in 1999.

Photography had proved a useful tool in his painting of the 60s and 70s, and in the 80s it became a medium in its own right. Composite Polaroids such as Still Life Blue Guitar (1982) used the multiple viewpoints of photography to explore the fractured unities of cubism. Photocollages such as Pearblossom Highway, 11-18 April 1981 #1 turn the differing colour registers of individual photographs into brush marks. All these fed into the large-scale, multipanelled landscapes that Hockney painted in the 90s and 2000s: enormous, wall-sized works such as The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire (2011), which drew on sources as diverse as Van Gogh and Uccello. In 2010, he began to experiment with the iPad as a tool for drawing, encouraged by his computer-savvy sister, Margaret. This innovation culminated in a huge audiovisual interactive show of “a personal journey through his art”, at Lightroom, King’s Cross, London, in 2022.

For all this ceaseless reinvention, the loss of his mother seemed to leave him rootless. In 2004, Hockney returned to Bridlington. By now, he lived in a constantly shifting menage of friends, assistants, lovers and former lovers. For the next few years, he moved back and forth between his various homes, finally settling in a 17th-century timbered house in Normandy with his last partner, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, in 2019. His iPad landscapes of the region, made in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, were shown in an exhibition, A Year in Normandy, at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris in 2021.

In an output as vast and diverse as Hockney’s, it was inevitable that there should be weak patches. His 2001 book, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, was ridiculed by art historians for its insistence that Jan van Eyck and others had used concave mirrors in their compositions. Hockney’s riff on the French landscape painter Claude Lorrain in the Royal Academy’s 2012 show, A Bigger Picture, drew splutters from British critics – in particular his 15ft x 24ft multipanel remake of Lorrain’s The Sermon on the Mount, the titular mountain rendered in carrot-orange and green.

For all that, Hockney’s work was, for six decades, the most known and liked of any British artist’s, and not just among Britons. His 13-room retrospective at Tate Britain in 2017, with nearly half a million visitors, was outdone by an even larger iteration at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York the following year. That November, his 1972 Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures) sold at auction in New York for $90.3m, making it the most expensive painting ever sold by a living artist.

He was made a Companion of Honour in 1997; in 2012, he was appointed to the Order of Merit. In 2019, Time magazine named the then 82-year-old Yorkshireman as one of the world’s 100 most influential people.

He remained an unrepentant smoker, even after a stroke in 2012. At least part of the reason for this was bloody-mindedness at the growing demonisation of cigarettes. “Smoking calms me down,” a defiant Hockney said. “It’s enjoyable. I don’t want politicians deciding what is exciting in my life.”

In 2023, he moved back to London. Hockney’s paintings of Normandy were shown at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen the following year, and a vast retrospective of nearly 500 works at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris the year after that.

He is survived by Jean-Pierre and two of his brothers, Philip and John.