David Hockney Lithograph of Water Made of Lines, and a Green Wash, and a Light Blue Wash (M.C.A.T 205) For Sale

The viewer is invited to quietly reflect through David Hockney’s eyes, as we gaze out towards the synonymous swimming pool that is used again and again throughout his artistic oeuvre. In 1964, Hockney moved from grey, dark London to the sun-drenched state of California. Within his newfound home, Hockney stumble across his ultimate muse, saying ‘I instinctively knew I was going to like it. And as I flew over San Bernardino and saw the swimming pools and the houses and everything and the sun, I was more thrilled than I have ever been in arriving in any city.’ Not only did Hockney find a new artistic inspiration from the expanse of LA swimming pools, but he also found a seemingly paradisal life within the thriving gay community, especially at a time when homosexuality was illegal in the United Kingdom. To Hockney, the swimming pool is a motif of this unabashed freedom Hockney felt in the move to LA, where he transformed into the artist he wanted to become. The swimming pool is a depicted in a landscape format, where an illusion of depth and shimmering light on water is created through washes of gentle blue and green, complete with undulating blue lines.

This series was created shortly after his highly successful Weather series, which conveyed his fascination with the depiction of natural elements. As Hockney himself said, “There is no such thing as bad weather, I can look at the little puddles in the rain and get pleasure out of them … if it's rainy I'll draw the rain, if it's sunny I'll draw the sun … The world is very, very beautiful if you look at it, but most people don't look very much.” Therefore, this series marks a turning point in Hockney’s artistic practice, as he started to look more closely at his natural environment for inspiration. As a manmade body of water, swimming pools offer an interesting dichotomy between the natural and the artificial. Hockney masterfully plays on these contrasting tropes, as the lithograph has elements of both realism and abstraction in his handling of water. Hockney detailed the formal issues of depicting water in his artwork, saying “It is a formal problem to represent water, to describe water, because it can be anything. It can be any colour, it’s movable, and it has no set visual description.”