David Hockney has revealed how he nearly gave up his work as he grieved for Dominic Elliott.
The artist says he considered leaving East Yorkshire to return to California in the wake of the shock death of his 23-year-old assistant.
Mr Elliott, 23, died after being taken to Scarborough Hospital from the world-famous artist's home in Kingston Road, Bridlington, on Sunday, March 17.
Police have found no obvious cause for the death of popular artist and rugby player Mr Elliott. An inquest has been adjourned until August.
At the time of his death, family members described has friendship with Mr Hockney, with whom he has worked for two years, as "like a father-son relationship".
Now Mr Hockney, 75, has explained in a national newspaper article how he considered abandoning his acclaimed work depicting the changing of the seasons in the East Riding countryside.
"It was an awful time and I was very upset," he said. "I thought I might go back to LA for a bit. I didn't quite know what to do."
However, Mr Hockney decided returning to work was the best way to deal with the trauma of the death of his friend.
"I'm not going to retire," he is quoted as saying in The Guardian.
"Of course it's still a very sad situation about Dominic and I'm still very sad myself. But I'm also OK. When you are drawing and working you seem to get outside yourself, and at the moment I think that is a very good thing."
Mr Hockney was born in Bradford but spent his summer holidays working on a friend's farm in the East Yorkshire Wolds.
In the 1960s, he became synonymous with the Pop Art movement.
Despite moving to Los Angeles in 1978, he returned often to East Yorkshire, where his mother Laura lived during the 1990s.
He finally left California and moved into her seafront Bridlington house in 2005.
His Wolds-inspired A Bigger Picture show attracted more than a million people to the Royal Academy of Arts.
An exhibition of his painting Bigger Trees Near Warter was one of the most popular in the history of Hull's Ferens Art Gallery.
He has a new exhibition opening at the Ashmolean museum in Oxford this week.
