Yesterday, the world lost an amazing painter, David Hockney. He passed away at the age of 88.
Has there ever been a painting, an illustration, or even a poster that has stayed with you for a lifetime? Once you saw it, you could not forget it?
There have been a handful of works like that for me. Artists’ works that works touched me in a special way. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if I liked the work, or didn’t like the work; but somehow needed to keep looking at it, and re-feeling the energy of it, even when years between viewings.
Sometimes I can feel the quality of light, it affects my eyes like I’m in the scene, a certain squint, a wide-open gaze.
Perhaps this is the gift of a great artist. Sharing authentic sight.
One such work is David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) below. It impacted me along with a handful of other pool-and-beach works he did in the 1960s and 1970s.
David Hockney’s pool images were of a place and space in his life (California as a gay man), and looking at these works, I could feel every ripple, partake in the quiet observance, and feel the watch of the hills in the background.
The lines he used were like combination of visual shortcut and perspective study, and his shadows were often as stark – but not as dark– as Edward Hopper’s, who had come a generation before across the pond.1
I perceived Hockney’s work as a relief from dark WWII works like Nighthawks, 1942, and Morning on Cape Cod, 1950. A chill leap into Hollywood happiness with bright colors, quiet experiences and cool pools. The color made me feel like it could be cheery, but the quiet loneliness of the figures doing their own thing but not connecting belies something else.
Everything one could wish for, beauty and Hollywood glamour, but not connection. One is on land, one in water. In his pool splash paintings, there is only cool observer and vestiges of what was once a person in the air.
In later years, Hockney’s art became much more colorful, more detailed, and textured. The textures once soft and smooth (like said tiles and ripples above) became more like like half-dried markers worked over a thousand times into vibrant wholes.
Sometimes I wonder if when we get older, and our vision may actually change, if these bolder statements are of the older seers, showing us what they perceive in urgent marks and brighter statements. In Hockney’s case, his paintings became busier, bolder, and the textures articulated.
Hockney, for whom I have the deepest respect and admiration, as a painter and a person, fare thee well.
I hope you take a few minutes to take a look through his website, maybe read a thing or two about art today and perhaps even sketch something yourself to share your view of the world.
Air Shark, 2025
iPhone photo with Markup
by EM Matteson
More of my Visual Art here.
FOOTNOTES & SUB-SUBTEXT