David Hockney: symbolic expressions of queer experience

David Hockney moved to the United States from England in the early 1960s. The social and environmental conditions of Los Angeles, California would inspire a new direction in the artist’s personal iconography which broadened to include palm trees, swimming pools and Beverly Hills architecture. The spacious and sunny atmosphere of Los Angeles was a stark contrast to the cold and stifling reality of post-war London, where the decriminalisation of gay relationships would only partially commence by 1967. In LA Hockney’s painting and printmaking motifs subtly shifted, from a visually coded commentary on representations of queer life, to symbolic expressions of his individual queer experience.  

From the beginning, Hockney affirmed his identity through the image making process. Either sifting through popular magazines, or equipped with his own handheld camera, he utilised photography to replicate transitional moments of everyday life through painting and printmaking techniques. Hockney negated the ‘passive way that photographs are consumed within society’¹ by transforming reproducible images into singular assertions of an embodied experience. Harbouring qualities that can be described as both visceral and banal, Hockney relished the physical endurance required to create the iconic swimming pool paintings such as A Bigger Splash, 1967 held in the Tate’s collection.

The ‘perversity’ which Hockney acknowledges has little to do with innuendoes around notions of sexual difference and more to do with the camera’s capacity to fragment space and time. For A diver, paper pool 17 (1978) which is comprised of 12 unique hand coloured sheets of pressed paper pulp, Hockney used a polaroid camera to develop the primary source material for his extensive studio process at Tyler Graphics Ltd. More than an illustrative device used to establish comparative registration marks, these snapshots serve as testimony. They are a collection of mementos that recognize the artist’s place within a new community through a distinct moment of domestic intimacy.

Hockney’s inclination to distil and celebrate moments from the everyday reaches beyond his early figurative depiction of a diver’s momentary ‘splash’. Throughout his career Hockney has returned to a floral motif that also delivers an allegory of time suspended. Comparable for their understated sensual quality, Hockney repeatedly portrays spring bulbs in their early state of bloom. Freshly cut and arranged in household vases they appear emergent, continuously frozen in time, at the precipice of becoming. In an interview for the Van Gogh Museum, Hockney discusses notions of ‘gaiety’ within the landscape The arrival of spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 – 31 May, No.2.

The momentary height of spring suggests the arrival of visual and physiological pleasure for the artist. Hockney positions his work through a perspective which verifies his recognition of space. A representation of queer experience which transpires through commonplace events, either in nature or the domestic realm.   

1. Anne O’Hehir, ‘Sex and Desire under the Californian sun: Photography in LA’ in California Cool: Art in Los Angeles 1960-1970s, National Gallery of Australia, 2018. p. 84.
2. David Hockney explains how L.A inspired his 20th century icon, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPI2n23_B2I
3. Interview, David Hockney on Vincent van Gogh, Van Gogh Museum, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA_I0qwnh_w