Men in The Arts Series; Part 2
David Hockney
A Bigger Splash is one of the best examples of Hockey’s interest in Pop Art and Cubism and his ability to combine both schools. The pool, house and diving board are geometric, rigid, everything is strictly proportioned. The splash of the water is in direct contrast. It represents unhampered movement and fluidity. In examining other works by Hockney, particularly his California pool and house paintings, you can see that these themes are repeated.
David Hockney is an British painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer. An important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century. Hockney has a home and studio in Kensington, London and two residences in California, where he has lived on and off for over 30 years.
In 1962 a visit to California inspired him to make a series of paintings of swimming pools in the comparatively new acrylic medium rendered in a highly realistic style using vibrant colors. The artist moved to Los Angeles in 1964, returned to London in 1968, and from 1973 to 1975 lived in Paris. In 1974 he began a decade-long personal relationship with Gregory Evans who moved with him to the US in 1976 and as of 2017 remains a business partner.
In the 1960’s Hockney attended the Royal College of Art in London. While there, he said he felt at home and took pride in his work. At the RCA, Hockney was featured in the exhibition Young Contemporaries that announced the arrival of British Pop art. Hockney was associated with the movement, but his early works display expressionist elements, similar to some works by Francis Bacon.
Hockney is openly gay, and unlike Andy Warhol, whom he befriended, he openly explored the nature of gay love in his portraiture. Sometimes, as in We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961), named after a poem by Walt Whitman, the works refer to his love for men. Already in 1963, he painted two men together in the painting Domestic Scene, Los Angeles, one showering while the other washes his back. In the summer 1966, while teaching at UCLA he met Peter Schlesinger, an art student who posed for paintings and drawings, and with whom he was romantically involved.
Hockney made prints, portraits of friends, and stage designs for the Royal Court Theatre, Glyndebourne, La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Born with synaesthesia, he sees synesthetic colors in response to musical stimuli. This does not show up in his painting or photography artwork, but is a common underlying principle in his designs for stage sets for ballet and opera—where he bases background colors and lighting on the colors he sees while listening to the piece’s music.
Hockney painted portraits at different periods in his career. From 1968, and for the next few years he painted friends, lovers, and relatives just under life size and in pictures that depicted good likenesses of his subjects. Hockney’s own presence is often implied, since the lines of perspective converge to suggest the artist’s point of view.
On arrival in California, Hockney changed from oil to acrylic paint, applying it as smooth flat and brilliant color. In 1965, the print workshop Gemini G.E.L. approached him to create a series of lithographs with a Los Angeles theme. Hockney responded by creating a ready-made art collection.]
In the early 1980s, Hockney began to produce photo collages, which he called “joiners”, first using Polaroid prints and subsequently 35mm, commercially processed color prints. Using Polaroid snaps or photolab-prints of a single subject, Hockney arranged a patchwork to make a composite image. Because the photographs are taken from different perspectives and at slightly different times, the result is work that has an affinity with Cubism, one of Hockney’s major aims—discussing the way human vision works. Some pieces are landscapes, such as Pearblossom Highway #2, others portraits, such as Kasmin 1982, and My Mother, Bolton Abbey, 1982.
Hockney returned more frequently to Yorkshire in the 1990s, usually every three months. He rarely stayed for more than two weeks until 1997, when his friend Jonathan Silver who was terminally ill encouraged him to capture the local surroundings. He did this at first with paintings based on memory, some from his boyhood. Hockney returned to Yorkshire for longer and longer stays, and by 2005 was painting the countryside en plein air. The oil paintings he produced after 2005 were influenced by his intensive studies in watercolor (for over a year in 2003–2004). He created paintings made of multiple smaller canvases—nine, 15 or more—placed together. To help him visualise work at that scale, he used digital photographic reproductions; each day’s work was photographed, and Hockney generally took a photographic print home.
Since 2009, Hockney has painted hundreds of portraits, still lifes and landscapes using the Brushes iPhone and iPad application, often sending them to his friends. His show Fleurs fraîches (Fresh flowers) curated by Charlie Scheips was held at La Fondation Pierre Bergé in Paris. A Fresh-Flowers exhibit opened in 2011 at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, featuring more than 100 of his drawings on 25 iPads and 20 iPods. In late 2011, Hockney revisited California to paint Yosemite National Park on his iPad.
In October 2016 Hockney published a new book David Hockney: A Bigger Book.