“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.”

(Christopher Knight, “Composite Views: Themes and Motifs in Hockney’s Art,” Exh. Cat., Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (and travelling), David Hockney: A Retrospective, 1988, p. 23)

David Hockney’s Lithograph of Water Made of Lines, 1978-1980 distills his most iconic symbol to the flat one-point perspective and clean lines that are cornerstone to his oeuvre. Hockney first visited California in 1963, glimpsing the pools of Los Angeles delightfully from the airplane. He stayed six months charmed by a town he felt was “free and sexy” and moved permanently to the city he is so aesthetically tied with in 1978.

This print comes from a series of eleven lithographs that Hockney created with master printer Kenneth Tyler who he continued to collaborate with through the 1990s. The image repeated between the series is in fact Tyler’s pool, with each iteration employing different tones and color washes. His first series with Tyler centered on the problem of how to visually represent weather, which Hockney solved by depicting the effects of weather. This series of pools similarly addresses the challenge of representing water and light, a puzzle Hockney returns to throughout his work.

Hockney often references his strong early training in draftsmanship as the technical base of his practice. His drawing skill allows for his notable experiment in many mediums; it is the connecting thread between his paintings, printmaking, and now of course digitally on his iPad. As the title of this print, Lithograph of Water Made of Lines, suggests he is always mindful of the technical illustration that art employs to communicate visually. Here he has distilled the principals of positive and negative space as the essential binary code for image. With color and tone he add temperature, pushing the limits on the lithography process to achieve the wash effect seen.

While love of process and technical challenges abounds in his prints, David Hockney’s work always nods to social and political themes as well. With his pools, he expresses natural freedom but within the confine of privacy and groomed-by-mankind landscapes. His masterful expression of water and light with the most basic relationship of line and space is doubled conceptually by his allusion to human presence with an empty pool.