"Eeh, by 'eck, put kettle on, I'm parched. I like smoking me. Smoking and bums. Pardon me, but I speak as I find. It's all about the lighting. Like that Caravaggio. I did that one on the iPad. Then I thought Bridlington or LA, and you know what... " etc etc.
Hockney first moved to LA when he was 27 and already a star, having created what was then known as British pop art. He used acrylic paint to capture the dazzling colours and the unending sunlight. He created a new city in our imaginations, a new kind of paradise. Most famously, there was A Bigger Splash, a swimming pool in which somebody has just vanished beneath the surface, leaving behind only the exquisitely painted white splash and a haunting feeling of loss. It was a modern version of a Van Gogh boot or chair, a portrait of somebody who isn’t there.
And here Hockney is, almost 50 years later, painting people who are most definitely there, and now peering at the surface of an LA pool, an old man in sweat pants, waiting for his masseur to work on his legs. Perspective is a lie, time doesn’t stop — but genius can make it linger.
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