David Hockney

Museum of Contemporary Art, David Hockney Prints 1954 - 1995, Tokyo, 1995, p. 127, no. 212 (another example illustrated in color)

Flying over Los Angeles, most travelers are mesmerized by the glimmering boulevards of Hollywood and its environs. However, it was the kaleidoscopic light refracting from California’s ethereal swimming pools which captured a young David Hockney’s attention. “California did affect me very strongly,“ he recalled of his first visit in 1963, “As I flew over San Bernardino and [looked] down and saw the swimming pools and the houses and everything and the sun, I was more thrilled than I’ve ever been arriving at any other city…” [1] For someone accustomed to the cloudy skies of West Yorkshire, California’s sun-drenched coastal highways, lined by split-level homes with glistening sapphire pools, were a revelation.

Both man-made and natural sources of water inspired Hockney for decades to follow – swimming pools especially as they represented the tranquility and recreation which he so relished in American life. Sometimes placid, and sometimes rippling, often with sensuous curves and plunging depths, Los Angeles’ private pools offered interesting challenges for the artist. Upon moving to California in 1964, Hockney thoroughly studied each body of water he encountered, as is evident in the artist’s Picture of a Hollywood Swimming Pool from the same year (sold Sotheby’s New York, November 2019, for $7,211,900).

According to Hockney, “Water in swimming pools changes its look more than in any other form… But the look of swimming pools is controllable – even its colour can be manmade – and its dancing rhythms reflect not only the sky but, because of its transparency, the depth of water as well. So I had to use techniques to represent this. If the water surface is almost still and there is a strong sun, then dancing lines with the colours of the spectrum appear everywhere”.[2] These rhythmic properties are best conveyed in the pulsing lines which comprise Lithographic Water Made of Lines, Crayon, and a Blue Wash (M.C.A.T. 212). In this later print, dated 1978-80, water makes up nearly the entire composition, allowing viewers to experience what Hockney referred to as the “language” of ripples and splashes.

[1] As quoted in: Walker, John Albert, Cultural Offensive: America’s Impact on British Art Since 1945,’ United Kingdom, Pluto Press, 1998.

[2] Nikos Stangos, Ed., David Hockney by David Hockney, London 1976, p. 104.