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A Lawn Sprinkler

David HOCKNEY

1967

Here is a typical afternoon on a California residence. A water sprinkler is moving on a wide stretch of deserted green lawn. Hockney, who moved to Los Angeles from England in 1964, often painted sun-splashed scenes from ordinary American middle-class life. The flat and clear picture with little shading is created by a new technique employing acrylic colors. The simple composition that is almost geometric in nature is divided into bright blue and green color fields, with the whole picture framed with a band of clear red. The artist himself has described this work to be almost a symmetrical abstract piece, but the water spraying from the nozzles breaks the regularity. Hockney has repeatedly painted pool surface reflecting sunlight and splashes of water. In these paintings, he contrasts water, with its amorphousness, with the solid and geometric composition, creating an expression which vacillates between reality and stylized pattern. The impression is similar at first glance to the straightforward reality presented in the contemporary works of Pop Art, but the world Hockney creates is very different in that it has a unique immateriality of a daydream.