David Hockney LA Paintings

Hockney here. I started this (The Man
in Shower in Beverley Hills) in LA
on arrival nineteen sixty-four 
before I went to teach that summer at
the University of Iowa
where I completed it and signed the back.
Americans take showers all the time.
In Britain we took baths or had a wash.
The shower was another aspect of 
the bright and shiny modern USA
adopted here. The picture's not from life 
but from a colour photograph by the
Athletic Model Guild who specialised 
in studies of the male nude in a mag 
they called Physique Pictorial. For artists
the attraction of the shower is clear:
the full-length body is in view and often 
moving racefully, caressing torso,
arms and legs. The bather's been a subject
for three hundred years at least. The shots 
were taken out of doors (presumably 
for light) and there'd be palm tree shadows on 
the fluffy carpet or a wall abruptly 
ending and a swimming pool beyond. 
My tiles distort perspective, adding to
the unreality. The chairs and table 
on the right are incomplete. The shower 
curtain is my own addition, green 
a sickly colour like the purple carpet 
and the plant was always in the early 
composition- lending voyeurism 
to the scene - I bent the leaves to hife
the bather's feet which I found hard to paint.
To capture moving water in a slow 
and careful manner is appealing to me.
The 'congealed gesture', as I put it,
or the frozen splash, attracts us
by the way in which the image captured 
in a twinkling with a camera is
laboriously transferred into paint. 
This yields two time-scales: that of the 
initial act, the photograph, and that 
of its restatement on the canvas. This 
creates the painting's strange intensity
as well as what you might call wit, devising
novel ways of painting water. 

                                                           
Later I took photographs myself
so never mind what Pablo said (in any
case he was a neo-classisist
himself in nineteen twenty). Never hid it -
I've relied on it in actual fact.
I bought my first 'good' camera in the year
I did A Bigger Splash, a Pentax for
my thirtieth, a thirty-five mil high-speed
job which gave control to me of lighting,
focus, format and so on. The camera
made it possible to capture what
was instantaneous. That's an advantage:
artists now can use the evidence
photography provides to service the
deliberate slow process of applying
paint to canvas. Bigger Splash contrasts
what is mechanic'lly produced (the photo)
with what's hand-drawn. Colour, richly spread
acrylic paint, and bold design belie
the underlying sense of emptiness
and silence which become the more compulsive
as you look. LA is surely not
so underpopulated? No sign of
the diver. Isolation is the feeling
viewers come away with.