User:Littlemissjellybelly

David Hockney – A Bigger Splash David Hockney was born Bradford, England 1937. He was schooled at Wellington Primary as a child and then moved onto the Bradford Grammar school of Art and then to the Royal College of Art in London. Hockney was featured in the exhibition “Young Contemporaries”, this saw the arrival of British Pop Art. David went along with this movement and his pieces during this period display expressionist elements, very similar to work by Francis Bacon. From 1963 Hockney was represented by John Kasmin, an art dealer. And in the same year Hockney took a visit to New York, following in a subsequent visit to California where he stayed for many years. Living in California inspired Hockney to make many paintings of swimming pools. One of these paintings was “A Bigger Splash”. This painting was the subject for a Jack Harzan film. A bigger Splash is the painting of a sunny Californian day. It shows a cloudless sky and two palm trees leaning over a single story house with a very flat roof. In front of the house there is an empty director’s chair sitting on a wide pink patio. In the foreground you see a yellow diving board coming in from the lower right corner. The diving board leads to a swimming pool. In the pool there are water fountains, which have been switched on, and a mass off water being lifted into the air. The water gives the idea that someone has just jumped into the pool. The fact that the diver is not visible shows that he/she has just jumped in. Back in front of the house the director’s chair sits in an exact diagonal line from where the splash has taken place, and on the roof of the house there is a thick white line directly across from where the diver has presumably jumped in. This composition was based off of two sources, a swimming pool in a book and an earlier drawing by Hockney of Californian buildings. This painting was basically simplifying but enlarging two of his earlier creations, A Little Splash and The Splash. The canvas for this painting is almost a perfect square due to the strong vertical and horizontal lines of the palm trees, the building, and the edge of the pool. Basically because the composition The painting has been split into 3 rectangles. The painting it interesting as due to the calmness the overall painting gives off this is distracting from the violence of the diver jumping into the pool. The painting was created using acrylic Liquitex on a white cotton duck canvas. This painting has no under drawing and Hockney has used a limited amount of colours: cobalt blue, ultramarine blue, raw sienna, burnt sienna, raw umber, Hooker's green, Naples yellow and titanium white, these have been applied either mixed or as tints. Excluding the splash the painting was finished with a very flat paint roller with the few details which were over painted. The splash itself was worked on for over a period of two weeks with immense detail using very fine brushes. The Marquess of Dufferin and Ava bought the finished work from John Kasmin's gallery in 1968, and sold it to the Tate in 1981.The painting is currently on loan to the Getty Center, where it is being displayed as part of the Pacific Standard Time exhibition.