David Hockney Pool Made with Paper and Blue Ink For Sale (M.C.A.T 234)

Hockney’s Pool Made with Paper and Blue Ink For Book, 1980, is a signed lithograph on wove paper print that depicts as it’s central motif: the swimming pool. Hockney’s oeuvre spans over 60 years, yet it is the swimming pool motif for which he is most renowned. Some of his most famous works, A Bigger Splash, Pool with Two Figures, Lithograph Water Made of Lines (see Andipa viewing room) centre on the swimming pool and through it ‘the challenge of representing water.’ Pool Made with Paper and Blue Ink for book is part of that Swimming Pool grouping and another example of Hockney’s meticulous artistry in his depiction of the fluidity of water and its mass surface movement.

Hockney explained his fascination with depicting water, ‘“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."

Pool Made with Paper and Blue Ink For Book depicts a similar scene as Lithograph Water Made of Lines (see Andipa viewing room): regular shaped landscape, diving board and pool. Yet unlike the ink and crayon based technical and graphic compositions of that print, Pool Made with Paper Blue Ink For Book depicts the pool scene with an almost entire surface of the image focusing on the blue water.

Hockney depicts the scene as if the viewer’s gaze is situated towards the bottom of the pool, looking up towards the diving board: the image shows his ability to create space and dimension through a flat canvas, the viewer sees through the water surface, as if immersed in its cool temperatures and fluid motions of the water themselves.

Whilst the composition is simply depicted, Hockney creates a complex portrait of the pool scene, playing with notions of reality and abstraction: he uses the diverse blue shading of the water, and a glimmer of the square tile pattern of the pool floor to add multidimension to the artwork. Hockney talked about his fascination with the ‘language of ripples and splashes,’ these are revealed through the graphic dark blue curved lines that he uses to punctuate the mass blue ‘brushstrokes’ and to create a sense of fluidity and movement in the water.  The motion of the blue water is dramatized through the juxtaposition with the graphic, clean lines of the white diving board evoking the modernist beams and balconies of LA’s architecture.

In Pool Made with Paper and Blue for Book, Hockney evolves his artistic language and techniques to experiment with the portrayal of water as matter: the artist uses the diving board as a metaphor for the ‘springboard’ California has given so many to achieving their hopes and dreams. Arguably Hockney’s artworks depicting water have become so timelessly admired because his representation of water is imbued with an emotional resonance that reflects the ebb and flow of life.