David Hockney (b. 1937). Lithographic Water Made of Lines, Crayon and Two Blue Washes, 1978-1980. Lithograph in colors o...

Description

David Hockney (b. 1937)
Lithographic Water Made of Lines, Crayon and Two Blue Washes, 1978-1980
Lithograph in colors on TGL handmade paper
29-1/8 x 34-1/8 inches (74.0 x 86.7 cm) (sheet)
P.P. (aside from an edition of 48 and 18 artist's proofs)
Signed, editioned, and dated in pencil along lower edge
Printed by Tyler Graphics, Ltd., Mount Kisco, New York; with their blindstamp lower right

Additional impressions of this work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate, London; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

The pool arrives first, unapologetically blue, like a rectangle of sky dropped into the desert and asked to behave. It holds that peculiar 1960s California optimism - the conviction that pleasure could be designed, poured in concrete, edged in white, and made permanent. Hockney lets it shimmer, not with realism but with sensation: the small, insistent marks that feel like sunlight skipping across chlorinated water, like the flicker behind your eyes after a long afternoon outside. This is not just a pool - it is an idea of freedom, the kind sold in glossy magazines and lived, briefly, between noon and dusk.

The geometry is part of the seduction. The diving board extends with a kind of casual authority, as if it has always known its purpose: to launch, to interrupt stillness, to turn looking into action. Around it, the green is stylized, clipped into submission, a modernist, AstroTurf Eden that feels less like nature than a promise of it. You can almost place yourself there - bare feet on warm concrete, the smell of Coppertone and neroli, the sound of Sinatra crackling on vinyl in the next room. It's the architecture of leisure, where every line insists that life can be as clean and deliberate as the composition itself.

And then there is the figure we don't quite see, only the suggestion of presence slipping into the water as shadow or reflection. But here, it feels less like absence and more like anticipation. Someone is about to dive, or just climbing out, leaving behind this elongated trace that dances with the ripples. It's a moment held open, not suspended in doubt but in possibility - the split second before laughter breaks, before the surface fractures into motion. You can almost hear it: the splash, the brief applause of water, the easy, unselfconscious joy of bodies in a dry heat.

What lingers is not solitude but a kind of radiant pause, one that carries the strange clarity that comes from too much sun and too much time to think. Hockney gives us the surface and leaves us to negotiate the depth ourselves, which is perhaps the point. It is Southern California as both place and projection-a landscape of light and leisure where joy is not naive but carefully observed. Everything is so beautiful, so precisely arranged, and yet something in it resists resolution. You sit with it the way you sit with a long afternoon, aware that nothing has happened and that everything has.


More information about David Hockney. See also: Hockney, David Artist.



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