The English painter David Hockney and the revival of watercolour

“We Two Boys Together Clinging”. That's the title David Hockney gave to one of his paintings, based on a poem by Walt Whitman. The year was 1961, and while Warhol and other artists were hiding their sexual orientation, Hockney proclaimed his from the rooftops, along with his style, which began by revisiting abstract expressionism and ended up bringing back watercolour as the leading technique of a Pop Art as charismatic as the artist himself.

The most expensive living artist on the planet

Hockney's Portrait of an Artist, for example, became in 2018 the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction, at a price of around a whopping 90 million dollars. His subjects tend to revolve around love, landscape and everyday life. One of his great contributions has been combining different creative techniques to make his paintings. Among the techniques he brought back, and which we already mentioned in the introduction, is watercolour. Specifically, he created a whole series of Nordic landscapes that he exhibited in 2003 and later on.

David Hockney has not only ventured into styles that “a priori” weren't his own, he also set about writing a book, “Secret Knowledge (2001)”, which digs into the efforts of the Flemish painters to use optics to trace key outlines and contours in their paintings. It wasn't the first book he wrote, in fact there are some fifteen books of his that revolve around his passion for painting. In Hockney we find a

Exposición de David Hockney en la Royal Academy of Arts (Londres), enero de 2012 (autor Kleon3)

David Hockney: from Pop Art to popular culture

Why else would it be called Pop Art? Popular culture has soaked up everything shared by the great artists of a movement that was energetic and candid compared to others of its time. In Hockney's case, he was immortalised in the film A Bigger Splash (1974), which took its title from one of the artist's works, specifically from his series of pools. In the same way, fashion hasn't left his art aside either, to the point that Burberry's 2005 spring/summer collection revolved around the artist.

And it doesn't stop there. The popular HBO series The Sopranos featured a heated debate about a painting of a pool that reminded Tony Soprano of the artist's aforementioned series. His art has definitely transcended. At 82 he is possibly the most outstanding painter around and one of the best of his time. As people tend to say in these cases, we'll always have Hockney's obsession with water, especially swimming pools, and with break-ups. Perhaps all of it was no more than a reflection of where he felt most at ease, in the falling movement of water and in the dismembering of established paradigms, of stillness and death.