On Painted Water/David Hockney's California
Water is ineffable. To truly convey the experience of reality, as opposed to an image of it, one must abandon techniques based on imitation; one must delineate the essence of the element in different ways, different to nature’s inherent compositions. Differences in portrayal can then be read as the unique characteristics of an individual’s - the painter’s - perception. This essay concerns the liminal differences between reality and painted depictions of it, and how beauty arises in that very gap, through David Hockney’s oeuvre, with emphasis on his piece titled California Copied From 1965 Painting in 1987.
Set on the third floor of the Broad Art Museum is Hockney’s gorgeous painting depicting two people relaxing in a pool. The painting strikes me with its contrasting textures and shapes, and its unconventional perspective of reality, which come together in a beautiful composition despite their structural differences. The effectiveness of the painting lies in making languor an object of envy to the onlooker. Because the painting is able to make you feel sensation and not just receive information, languor is heightened, and as a result, there is meaning and dimensionality to our perception of the painting.
At first, the painting feels unnerving. For all its vibrancy, there is a desolation that echoes further. We recognize objects but they are few in number and only hinted towards, like the faces resting on the floaties or the bottoms of the three tree trunks; there is one solitary bench, one wine glass, one colorful towel, one rather sad and unhealthy potted plant. The background meets the viewer’s eye as they trace the shapes upward and are met with an expanse of just lush green on green. Hockney’s framing is deliberate; the painting is a snapshot and not a scene or a vista presented in its totality. The viewer is given incomplete information; they are focused on the two figures in the pool. They do not know whether there are more people around, more trees, more anything. The subtle sense of mystery with the surreal images casts a feverish effect.
It is a scene everybody is familiar with to some extent - relaxing in the pool. Hockney became famous for his scenes of swimming pools; his work has come to symbolize a perennial distillation of California and its sunshine, water, and leisure. His articulation of California stands in the twentieth century canon alongside Didion’s and Babitz’s portrayals of the Golden State. Hockney, however, repurposed the effortless indolence of California through his Pop Art colour and Cubist textures.
Hockney and his paintings came decades after what Berger considered the end of the moment - as opposed to a movement, which is one of Berger’s key claims - in his essay The Moment of Cubism, in 1914 at the dawn of the First World War, yet they still echo a similar ethos. For Berger, Cubism cannot be adequately defined as a style or a policy; it was a moment “experienced by a certain number of people,” a brief interval of confidence during which a transformed world seemed genuinely possible. What that moment changed permanently was the relationship between the painted image and reality. Berger traces the metaphorical models that have governed painting through history: the mirror of the Renaissance, which imitated nature; the theatre stage of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which constructed artificial examples in order to transcend nature; the personal account of the nineteenth century, in which the artist recounted his own experience of nature. Cubism replaced all of these with the model of the diagram: “a visible, symbolic representation of invisible processes, forces, structures.” A diagram need not abandon appearances altogether, but it treats them symbolically, as signs rather than imitations. Hockney’s pool is exactly such a diagram. The painting never pretends to be a window; every reference to appearance is made, as the Cubists made it, as a sign laid upon the picture surface - where they put a circle for the top of a bottle or a lozenge for an eye, Hockney puts a curling line for water. The line stands for water without ever imitating it. And though the moment itself was cut short by the war, Berger insists that Cubism re-created the very syntax of art, supplying every later movement with the means of its own liberation. Hockney, painting California half a century later, is spending that inheritance.
Apart from its subtly offputting minimalism and its slightly surreal air, the piece’s bright color palette that attracts our eye; it conveys the positivism of the painting. It is the bright splash of color that convinces us of a mood. It is the color that enraptures the viewer and exalts relaxation as a theme.
In the painting, color occurs to us as solid and opaque; there is very sparse shading (save for the bare bodies resting peacefully on a floatie, whose images are fairly realistic; the brush strokes limn the natural curves of the body, the palettes of flesh mimic light on skin, a sunburnt back, an untanned bum). Color is allowed to be itself, to exist by itself and bare its intrinsic characteristics. This is a key stylistic trait. William Gass, in his essay On Being Blue, devotes an entire meditation to the way a single color can absorb and emit feeling - how blue belongs at once to distance, to melancholy, to desire, to the sky and to the mind contemplating it. Color, for Gass, is not merely a property of objects but a condition of consciousness. Hockney paints as though he agrees: his blues are not the blues of any actual pool but the blues of the feeling of a pool, freed from descriptive duty and allowed to radiate on their own terms.
Blots of color - baby blue, cerulean, and navy - suggest depth and movement; they mimic the dapples in water, their shadows as the surface dips and cups under and over itself. Hockney leaves a majority of patterned space to the canvas - to the color white - emulating reflections of light.
Reflections in the water are not shown as facsimiles of real life objects but rather alluded to in effect; the water is not truly reflective the way it normally is. The painting’s technique and concomitant effect are redolent of Cubist philosophy, in which early twentieth century painters reduced the physical to the abstract and introduced another, different way of seeing the world. Cubism changed how nature could be depicted in art; it offered a metaphorical model as opposed to a mirror of the world. The water in this painting feels metaphorical too.
The contrast in the attempts at reality resembles the distraughtness of all the different things in your life pulling your mind apart in every moment, bound together by the tension of every living, breathing moment - into the synchronicity of the moment, perhaps. Berger remarks on this synchronicity in The Moment of Cubism: the content of a Cubist picture, he argues, is not a set of static entities but a configuration of interactions - between different aspects of the same event, between empty space and filled space, between the seer and the thing seen. The eye is never permitted to settle on a single resolution; it must hold every relation at once, and the viewer must find their own place within the picture’s content, knowing their view from that place is bound to be only partial. Hockney’s painting demands the same simultaneity. Realist bodies, flat Pop colour, Cubist water, hard architectural geometry - all are present at once, and our attention is stretched between them the way a mind is stretched between its concerns. That tension is not a flaw in the composition; it is the very sensation of a moment being lived.
In art, water is always hard to depict; really, all of life is hard to depict. Painters often labour over water. One recalls Monet’s pointillist brush strokes on his myriad water scenes that came together to produce an extraordinary effect - a nostalgia for nature, the blurry effect feeling like a memory. One also recalls the impastos on oil paintings, where the paint sticks up from the canvas to convey the depth inherent in water.
Even in literature, water is hard to describe in a way that is meaningful. An example that comes to mind is David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, where he describes his “marrow level dread of the oceanic,” “the ocean as one enormous engine of decay,” the intuition of the sea as “primordial nada” populated by tooth-studded things rising towards you. (I have not read Moby Dick, but I trust Melville described water well too.)
The more common something is, the more banal we consider it. To make something like that - like water - stand out, a preternatural portrayal is required. Harold Pinter said, “The more acute the experience, the less articulate its expression.” Everybody is familiar with every aspect of water because it only has so many, and we see it in some form every day. This line of thought is especially relevant here, and it can be generalized to Berger’s philosophies too. In Seker Ahmet and the Forest, Berger argues that the inherited language of European landscape painting could not give expression to the experience of the peasant who works the land rather than gazes upon it: a visual language built for the traveler’s view, organized around the horizon, fails the person for whom the land is not a view at all but a surrounding presence. The conventional language for depicting water fails in precisely the same way. Rows of dutiful wavelike strokes, faithful reflections, the postcard shimmer - these merely reproduce the banal vision everybody already possesses: the water seen, never the water felt. Berger writes in The Moment of Cubism that art is an expression of our sense of “the inadequacy of the given.” The given, here, is exactly that banal vision of water. Hockney’s refusal of it - his decision to paint water as a pattern no eye has ever literally seen - is what allows the painting to return water to us as an experience rather than as a fact.
“Every convincing painting makes a spatial system of its own,” Berger observes of Seker Ahmet’s forest. This painting succeeds in that. Minimalist themes and subjects are met with a vibrant blend of artistic styles. Hockney’s elements of Pop Art and Cubism are reflected through the contrasting compositional elements: Pop Art is seen in the bright color and the simplified objects, Cubism in the expression of water.
Here, water is a pattern. Undulations are simplified to curvy lines. Water is not an immense, amorphous mass that is iridescent under light. Still, the depth normally conveyed is not lost. The illusion of symmetricity that many artists fall for belies real life. In this painting, Hockney could have chosen a still, monotonous pattern to depict a still swimming pool, the way many painters use rows of wavelike strokes to mimic the deckling of a surf. Instead he embraces the imperfections of nature’s patterns. Hockney tightens the gaps between the lines towards the back of the pool and only uses dark blues in this section of the painting to convey distance. He lets knots and intersections form in his water patterns to convey the flow - the places where current meets current and the surface momentarily forgets which way it was moving.
Where the pool swells and divots, the pattern is more concentrated; closer to the foreground the lines sparse out and convey an openness, a widening of perspective. Something about the pattern is redolent of the simplicity and freedom of a child’s crayon scribbles on a wall. Those themes, those semantics enter our perception too. Seeing Hockney’s painting feels like an elegant expression of puerile, joyous emotion. One feels freer; one feels relaxed.
Hockney distills the silhouette of water to two dimensional squiggly lines that contrast with the strict geometry of the surroundings. Yet one feels the gentle laps in the pool. This is the central paradox of the painting’s technique, and it is a Cubist paradox. Berger observes that in a Cubist picture the flat surface is never denied: the eye makes its forays into the depicted space and returns, again and again, to the fact of a two-dimensional design, depositing what it has discovered upon the surface before setting out once more. Hockney’s water works on us in exactly this rhythm. We read the curling lines first as pure pattern, flat as wallpaper; then the pattern resolves into glare, dapple, and depth, and for a moment we are in the water; then the lines flatten again. The painting oscillates, and the oscillation is the sensation - because this is precisely what the surface of a sunlit pool does to the eye in life, dissolving from substance into light and back again.
The painting is not lifelike in its expression - it is exaggeration, it is metaphor, it is an abstraction - and yet it mimics the sensation of experience perfectly. Another example would be the second person, further away from us, whose mien is made by a dash for a mouth and a dot for an eye. In demonstrating a quiddity of experience, there is a phenomenology to the painting. Viewing the piece is the experience of experience. This is analogous to Seker Ahmet’s Woodcutter in the Forest, where distance and depth belie accuracy but make it more of a cerebral viewing experience, mimicking the feeling of being lost in a forest. Berger is haunted by that painting because of its double vision: the far beech tree, which by every rule of perspective should recede, “simultaneously withdraws and approaches”; we see the woodcutter in the forest, dwarfed and enclosed by it, at the same time as we see him from outside it, swallowed as Jonah was in the whale’s belly. Academically speaking, each of these contradictions is a mistake; yet the painting’s precision, Berger concludes, is existential - it is faithful not to optics but to the experience of forest itself. Hockney’s perspective is impossible in just this way. The pool’s surface tilts up to meet us as though seen from above, while the bodies, the ladder, and the diving board are seen from the side; the water advances on the viewer the way Seker Ahmet’s beech does, refusing to stay politely in the distance. And as with the forest painting, the impossibility is what makes it true. Here, the viewer feels the dizzying headrush of being out too long, blinding your eyes into harsh refractions, leaving the pretty water as a spool of blue yarn that unfurled everywhere. Berger, reading the forest through Heidegger, calls this the “coming-into-the-nearness of distance”; Hockney’s pool comes into nearness the same way, the whole scene of leisure pressing itself against the picture plane until we are no longer entirely outside of it.
The stark contrast between compositional structures, the different painting styles all occupying our eye at the same time, resembles the way different tangents in our life occupy our mind, pulling at our attention from every corner - and yet everything coheres. Objects occur to us in the same ontological way: the pool is equal in its existence to the concrete borders, to the grass. The connotations strike differently - the associations of water, of lawn, of sunbathed skin each carry their own register of memory - but no object is subordinated to another; nothing is mere backdrop. As in a Cubist canvas, where a hill, a violin, and a hand are built from the same interchangeable planes, Hockney grants every element the same degree of reality, so that the painting becomes a field of presences rather than a hierarchy of subject and setting. Hockney’s paintings can thereby be reduced to the philosophic disagreement of the senses: each style reports the same scene differently, the way the eye, the skin, and memory disagree about a hot afternoon.
There is something comforting in this aspect, as if Hockney’s very personal imitation of life has become ours too, and so we can feel the warmth of the skin tones melting into each other against the starkly filled shades of blue. The contrast in the visual semantics of color fixes the lazing figures in the center of the composition as objects of our attention and thus, objects of desire. The viewer wants to enjoy a languorous day in the pool too.
“Art is a record of visual experience,” but it is also about a consciousness coming into contact with the real, physical world. This painting is meaningful because it translates what it feels like to be by the pool in a unique way, as opposed to presenting visual facts. It captures how mesmerizing water can be by contrasting its unique shape with its surroundings; it is relaxing to look at because it embraces languor; it is confident in its color. Berger suggests that of a Cubist picture one should ask not whether it is true, nor whether it is sincere, but whether it continues. Hockney’s pool answers for itself. Sixty years’ distance from the moment of Cubism, on a wall in Los Angeles, it continues: the water still moves, the sun still blinds, and the viewer, standing on a museum floor, still feels the surreal warmth of a day they have not lived.
Work Cited:
Berger, John. "The Moment of Cubism." New Left Review, no. 42, 1967, pp. 75–94
Berger, John. "Seker Ahmet and the Forest." About Looking, Pantheon Books, 1980, pp. 86–93.
Gass, William H. On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry. David R. Godine, 1976.
Hockney, David. California Copied From 1965 Painting in 1987. 1987, The Broad, Los Angeles.
Pinter, Harold. "Writing for the Theatre." 1962. Plays One, Faber and Faber, 1991.
Wallace, David Foster. "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments, Little, Brown and Company, 1997.
