David Hockney
b. 1937
A SHORT BACKGROUND OF DAVID HOCKNEY'S PAPER POOLS
In the late 1970s, David Hockney began experimenting with the unconventional paper pulp medium in an attempt to capture the subtle hues of shimmering light on water.
Source (excerpt): Marco Livingstone for Phillips Auction House (2017).
Marco Livingstone is an art historian, writer and independent curator based in London.
David Hockney's Paper Pools, a sustained series of works made from coloured and pressed paper pulp, were made between August and October 1978 during six weeks of feverish activity at Tyler Graphics Ltd, the studios near Mount Kisco, NY, run by the master printer Kenneth Tyler; the artist had previously worked with him on lithographs at his Gemini workshop in Los Angeles. During this brief period, he produced 29 separate images, some in multiple versions.
The entire group of pictures, in a medium recently devised by Tyler and used by Hockney only this one time in his life during an extraordinary burst of creative energy, came about spontaneously, almost by chance. Stopping off in New York City en route from London to Los Angeles, where he was about to resettle after years of absence, Hockney was persuaded to make a detour to visit his old friend, and to explore the medium of paper pulp printmaking. Always excited by the exploration of an unfamiliar medium and by his understanding of how best to exploit its characteristics, Hockney immediately responded also to the lure of the intense colours, which did not just sit on the surface but were physically impregnated into it.
His enthusiasm is straightforwardly conveyed in his text for the Paper Pools book published by Thames & Hudson in 1980: "I love new mediums and this was something I had never seen or used before. I think mediums can turn you on, they can excite you: they always let you do something in a different way, even if you take the same subject, if you draw it in a different way, or if you are forced to simplify it, to make it bold because it is too finicky. I like that."
One of the great joys of this prolonged experiment, which was to have a permanent impact on Hockney's later exploitation of bold forms and intense colour, was the natural marriage with a subject that had preoccupied him in his first swimming pool paintings 14 years earlier: the refraction of light through gently moving water. The opportunity to depict water through a medium that was itself literally fluid led him to find new and often visually witty solutions to problems of depiction that had preoccupied him for so long, and through this joyous experience to reinvent his art as a life-affirming spectacle infused in a succulent, almost technicolour, brilliance.
The Paper Pools project was recognized in this limited edition lithograph print and accompanying book. Limited to 1,000 copies, it has been desired by serious collectors since it was first published in 1980.
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