When David Hockney in the 1960s turned his attention to a photograph of a splash-splattered swimming pool, he did what most of us today, immersed in an endless stream of digital images, do not. He kept looking.
For two weeks, the artist worked tirelessly from the photo to perfect his rendition in his acrylic painting A Bigger Splash, of the dancing droplets that erupted when some long-forgotten swimmer threw themselves into the deep end. The splash ended in an instant. Yet captured in Hockney’s most famous work, it lives on, an unremarkable backyard moment afforded the scrupulous attention of a royal portrait.
In devoting such deep focus, Hockney, who died Thursday at the age of 88, restored something that had been lost in that original image. The artist thought that paintings and drawings have a certain depth that photography on its own lacks. He spoke of this with intensity in his later years, saying in a 2013 interview with Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, that photography “colored our vision” and might eventually “break something.” The medium, he noted, feels temporary. By contrast, “drawing,” he said, “takes time. A line has time in it.”
If images today have a way of eating up time, keeping our fingers scrolling, Hockney’s works might be said to give it back. Perhaps this is why Hockney’s art can seem both in time and out of it. His paintings can feel like a respite for screen-addled eyes, even as they nod to technology’s ability to shape images.
Many will remember Hockney as the bespectacled British painter of “sun-soaked” Los Angeles scenes, a master of mid-century Americana. But beyond the California glam is an effort to reckon with new ways of seeing—to reclaim what’s been lost in the modernity he so coolly depicts.
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An artist who wielded paintbrushes and iPads alike, Hockney had a fascination with the mechanics of image-making. He wrote a book pushing much-debated theories about old masters using mirrors and lenses to achieve realism, and he was intrigued by any “technology that is about pictures,” he told Govan.
In the 1970s and ’80s, he made collages from Polaroids that puncture perspective à la Cubism and seem to show time spread out all at once, like a map. And no approach was too office-coded, or too mainstream. He used fax machines to send drawings around the world. Intrigued by the way photocopiers work as both cameras and printing machines, he owned three for artistic experiments. More recently, he ventured into the immersive-experiences fad, turning a form that has become something of a trope—long-dead artists’ public-domain works being recirculated for profit—into something bespoke.
Hockney’s most known tech venture is undoubtedly his work with iPads, which was the subject of a 2021 show at the Royal Academy. The pieces have a whimsical quality to them, recalling afternoons spent playing with Microsoft Paint. Yet they’re also bold, even unapologetic, in their embrace of a technology that’s come to be associated largely with toddlers and Baby Boomers. The New York Times, in its obituary, dismissed this later work as “busywork.” But to me, the iPad pieces seem like a natural extension of Hockney’s visual language.
When I first saw Hockney’s art, in high school, it reminded me, oddly, of The Sims, the popular life-simulation video game in which you build characters and houses. His multipoint and aerial perspectives sparked memories of the game screen. His human figures hover at the edge of realism, like early-aughts computer graphics. Long before screens were a fixture of modern life, Hockney seemed capable of distilling the world into pixelated, minimalistic forms that amplified action: water streaming from a shower, the ch-ch-ch of California sprinklers against smooth buildings and flat landscapes.
When discussing A Bigger Splash, he remarked on the irony that he had spent significantly longer working on a split-second splash than he had on the more permanent house in the background.
Hockney often bemoaned what he saw as the loss of bohemia to the suburbs. Yet a quiet bohemia remains alive in his work—an insistence that much can exist within a passing, seemingly trivial moment. If we look slowly, perhaps, we can share in the time he left behind.