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Lot Essay
“If there is one image that more than any other is conventionally associated with David Hockney’s art, surely it is the image of the swimming pool. There are many reasons for this. He has painted, drawn, photographed, or made prints containing images of swimming pools from the mid-1960s to the present day. His rise to public prominence more than twenty years ago was coincident with the first appearance of this image in his works.” Christopher Knight
A splendid thesis in light and shadow, David Hockney’s Green Pool with Diving Board and Shadow (Paper Pool 3) magisterially conveys the variegated effects of the late afternoon sun reflecting and refracting off a pool’s shimmering surface. Depicting the great British artist’s most famous motif, Green Pool with Diving Board and Shadow (Paper Pool 3) expands the possibilities of figuration available to Hockney through the adoption of a new working process and medium, establishing his definitive investigation of the pool. Residing in the same private collection for the past thirty years, this stunning example from Hockney’s pioneering paper pulp series demonstrates the artist at complete command of his unique mode of innovation.
Returning from a sojourn to England, Hockney stopped over in New York before returning to Los Angeles while waiting for a new driver’s license to arrive. This layover proved fortuitous for the artist, as it allowed him to accept an invitation from his friend Kenneth Tyler, a master printmaker with a studio just outside the city, to collaborate on a new series of works. Adamant that he wanted to paint and not make lithographs, Tyler then persuaded the artist to stay by showing him a revolutionary new artistic technique adding colored dyes to wet paper pulp before pressing into paper, a process which he had just worked on with the Color Field painter Ellsworth Kelly. The results “were stunningly beautiful,” writes Hockney (D. Hockney, Paper Pools, Abrams, 1980, pg. 9)
Hockney was immediately infatuated with this technique, writing that “I love new mediums and this was something I had never seen or used before. I think mediums can turn you on, they can excite you; they always let you do something a different way, even if you take the same subject” (op. cit.). Hockney immediately set to work, prolonging what was supposed to be a stay of a few days into a three-month residency at Tyler’s studio. After experimenting with a series of flowers, Hockney set upon the pool subject which he had famously explored the previous decade upon his first arrival in Los Angeles. Inspired by the way in which Henri Matisse’s paper cut out The Swimming Pool completely integrated line and color into a singular mesmerizing effect, the artist used his camera and drawing to meticulously study Tyler’s swimming pool, where he and the studio employees would lunch every day: “I kept looking at the swimming pool; it’s a wonderful subject, water, the light on the water. And this process with paper pulp demanded a lot of water; you have to wear boots and rubber aprons. I thought, really I should do it, find a watery subject for this process, and here it is; here this pool, every time you look at the surface, you look through it, you look under it” (op. cit., 21).
The paper pulp technique was the perfect medium for Hockney to fully express the pool’s complicated effects, for it captures completely the paradox of freezing in time a subject always in motion, resolving within the man-made container of water the play of light against a natural backdrop. To create the work, Hockney poured liquid color pulp directly into molded sheet metal placed over a paper base, like casting bronze. Hockney then manipulated the still-wet pulp, carefully applying liquid dyes with a variety of self-invented tools and procedures, utilizing brushes, airbrushes, basters, and even spoons to achieve different densities and hues in his coloration. Hockney then further worked the surface of the paper, employing combs, toothbrushes, hoses, and his own fingers to achieve the perfect textured result before pressing the pulp together, fusing the work together into a singular sheet. The resulting achievement was less a work on paper than a work where form and texture elegantly inhere within the paper medium itself, line and color operating in tandem to create the vivid illusion of watery depths. This laborious process produces incredible surface effects where colors are deep and vivid, attaining subtle effects akin to painting with glazes.
In Hockney’s renowned earlier depiction of a pool in Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), the artist thinned down his acrylic paint with water a detergent, applying it in washes of color to specific sections of raw, unprimed canvas in what Marco Livingstone describes as a “watery technique to represent a watery subject” (M. Livingston, David Hockney, Thames & Hudson, 1996, pg. 147). Hockney eclipses this watery effect with the powerfully simplified figuration in Paper Pool 3, as evinced in the artist’s description of the production process, which required the artist to wear boots and a rubber apron: “you had to use enormous quantities of water; it took a thousand gallons of water to make one of these, which seems to me an awful lot” (D. Hockney, op. cit., pg. 80).
“If there is one image that more than any other is conventionally associated with David Hockney’s art,” art critic Christopher Knight explained, “surely it is the image of the swimming pool. There are many reasons for this. He has painted, drawn, photographed, or made prints containing images of swimming pools from the mid-1960s to the present day. His rise to public prominence more than twenty years ago was coincident with the first appearance of this image in his works. As an expatriate Briton living principally in Los Angeles, he is easily associated with the commonplace clichés of that sunny climate, the swimming pool among them. A rather silly film, although one that achieved a degree of cultish popularity in the 1970s, chronicled his execution of a picture” (C. Knight,” Composite Views: These and Motifs in Hockney’s Art,” David Hockney: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum, 1988, p. 23).
Indeed, Hockney’s discovery of his most famous subject matter corresponded to his arrival in Los Angeles nearly a decade earlier. Already celebrated as an enfant terrible of Contemporary art by the time he left the Royal College of Art in London in 1962, Hockney had first traveled to California in January 1964. The place held a magnetic draw for the artist, who had immersed himself in the potent idealism of its sun-drenched landscape, and the California that he had found in magazines, movies and the gay novels of John Rechy. He had daydreamed about a world of warmth and pleasure, reminiscent of Matisse’s Nice with its palms, bathers, striped awnings and simple forms and was delighted to find that it was everything he had hoped it would be.
Hockney carefully studied Tyler’s pool from every possible angle and time of day, carefully attending to how differencing in lighting and shadow would completely change the composition. Here, Hockney renders the pool at high noon; light penetrates all of the way to the bottom of the pool, reflecting out from the depths in the specks of white pulp scattered across the paper. The diving board casts a direct shadow, shown in the portion by the edge of the pool. When the shadow plunges into the water, it begins to curl and move about, dancing with the rippling waves in a masterful evocation of reality. Hockney felt liberated by the endless opportunities presented by the new medium, remarking that “finally, I realized, because I had these bucket full of blue and green, if this was paint and I was doing a painting I wouldn’t have the nerve to just throw it around like this and pour it on” (op. cit., 62). This new technique revolutionized his practice, allowing him at long last to satisfactorily depict the marvelous visuals yielded by pools, a result which had been obsessing the artist for almost two decades. Finally completing his residency at Tyler’s studio and on his way to California, Hockney writes, “I’m not going to paint about pools; I’ve done enough now” (op. cit., 100).
A splendid thesis in light and shadow, David Hockney’s Green Pool with Diving Board and Shadow (Paper Pool 3) magisterially conveys the variegated effects of the late afternoon sun reflecting and refracting off a pool’s shimmering surface. Depicting the great British artist’s most famous motif, Green Pool with Diving Board and Shadow (Paper Pool 3) expands the possibilities of figuration available to Hockney through the adoption of a new working process and medium, establishing his definitive investigation of the pool. Residing in the same private collection for the past thirty years, this stunning example from Hockney’s pioneering paper pulp series demonstrates the artist at complete command of his unique mode of innovation.
Returning from a sojourn to England, Hockney stopped over in New York before returning to Los Angeles while waiting for a new driver’s license to arrive. This layover proved fortuitous for the artist, as it allowed him to accept an invitation from his friend Kenneth Tyler, a master printmaker with a studio just outside the city, to collaborate on a new series of works. Adamant that he wanted to paint and not make lithographs, Tyler then persuaded the artist to stay by showing him a revolutionary new artistic technique adding colored dyes to wet paper pulp before pressing into paper, a process which he had just worked on with the Color Field painter Ellsworth Kelly. The results “were stunningly beautiful,” writes Hockney (D. Hockney, Paper Pools, Abrams, 1980, pg. 9)
Hockney was immediately infatuated with this technique, writing that “I love new mediums and this was something I had never seen or used before. I think mediums can turn you on, they can excite you; they always let you do something a different way, even if you take the same subject” (op. cit.). Hockney immediately set to work, prolonging what was supposed to be a stay of a few days into a three-month residency at Tyler’s studio. After experimenting with a series of flowers, Hockney set upon the pool subject which he had famously explored the previous decade upon his first arrival in Los Angeles. Inspired by the way in which Henri Matisse’s paper cut out The Swimming Pool completely integrated line and color into a singular mesmerizing effect, the artist used his camera and drawing to meticulously study Tyler’s swimming pool, where he and the studio employees would lunch every day: “I kept looking at the swimming pool; it’s a wonderful subject, water, the light on the water. And this process with paper pulp demanded a lot of water; you have to wear boots and rubber aprons. I thought, really I should do it, find a watery subject for this process, and here it is; here this pool, every time you look at the surface, you look through it, you look under it” (op. cit., 21).
The paper pulp technique was the perfect medium for Hockney to fully express the pool’s complicated effects, for it captures completely the paradox of freezing in time a subject always in motion, resolving within the man-made container of water the play of light against a natural backdrop. To create the work, Hockney poured liquid color pulp directly into molded sheet metal placed over a paper base, like casting bronze. Hockney then manipulated the still-wet pulp, carefully applying liquid dyes with a variety of self-invented tools and procedures, utilizing brushes, airbrushes, basters, and even spoons to achieve different densities and hues in his coloration. Hockney then further worked the surface of the paper, employing combs, toothbrushes, hoses, and his own fingers to achieve the perfect textured result before pressing the pulp together, fusing the work together into a singular sheet. The resulting achievement was less a work on paper than a work where form and texture elegantly inhere within the paper medium itself, line and color operating in tandem to create the vivid illusion of watery depths. This laborious process produces incredible surface effects where colors are deep and vivid, attaining subtle effects akin to painting with glazes.
In Hockney’s renowned earlier depiction of a pool in Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), the artist thinned down his acrylic paint with water a detergent, applying it in washes of color to specific sections of raw, unprimed canvas in what Marco Livingstone describes as a “watery technique to represent a watery subject” (M. Livingston, David Hockney, Thames & Hudson, 1996, pg. 147). Hockney eclipses this watery effect with the powerfully simplified figuration in Paper Pool 3, as evinced in the artist’s description of the production process, which required the artist to wear boots and a rubber apron: “you had to use enormous quantities of water; it took a thousand gallons of water to make one of these, which seems to me an awful lot” (D. Hockney, op. cit., pg. 80).
“If there is one image that more than any other is conventionally associated with David Hockney’s art,” art critic Christopher Knight explained, “surely it is the image of the swimming pool. There are many reasons for this. He has painted, drawn, photographed, or made prints containing images of swimming pools from the mid-1960s to the present day. His rise to public prominence more than twenty years ago was coincident with the first appearance of this image in his works. As an expatriate Briton living principally in Los Angeles, he is easily associated with the commonplace clichés of that sunny climate, the swimming pool among them. A rather silly film, although one that achieved a degree of cultish popularity in the 1970s, chronicled his execution of a picture” (C. Knight,” Composite Views: These and Motifs in Hockney’s Art,” David Hockney: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum, 1988, p. 23).
Indeed, Hockney’s discovery of his most famous subject matter corresponded to his arrival in Los Angeles nearly a decade earlier. Already celebrated as an enfant terrible of Contemporary art by the time he left the Royal College of Art in London in 1962, Hockney had first traveled to California in January 1964. The place held a magnetic draw for the artist, who had immersed himself in the potent idealism of its sun-drenched landscape, and the California that he had found in magazines, movies and the gay novels of John Rechy. He had daydreamed about a world of warmth and pleasure, reminiscent of Matisse’s Nice with its palms, bathers, striped awnings and simple forms and was delighted to find that it was everything he had hoped it would be.
Hockney carefully studied Tyler’s pool from every possible angle and time of day, carefully attending to how differencing in lighting and shadow would completely change the composition. Here, Hockney renders the pool at high noon; light penetrates all of the way to the bottom of the pool, reflecting out from the depths in the specks of white pulp scattered across the paper. The diving board casts a direct shadow, shown in the portion by the edge of the pool. When the shadow plunges into the water, it begins to curl and move about, dancing with the rippling waves in a masterful evocation of reality. Hockney felt liberated by the endless opportunities presented by the new medium, remarking that “finally, I realized, because I had these bucket full of blue and green, if this was paint and I was doing a painting I wouldn’t have the nerve to just throw it around like this and pour it on” (op. cit., 62). This new technique revolutionized his practice, allowing him at long last to satisfactorily depict the marvelous visuals yielded by pools, a result which had been obsessing the artist for almost two decades. Finally completing his residency at Tyler’s studio and on his way to California, Hockney writes, “I’m not going to paint about pools; I’ve done enough now” (op. cit., 100).