Gigi Chen’s work creates an aesthetic that combines her training as a traditional animator and painter, along with her love of the techniques of the old masters. Entrenched in the art of storytelling, Gigi pulls together contemporary idioms of cartooning, photo-realism, texture, and design to produce works that coalesce into “love, craft, and fun.”
David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)
The story of one of the 20th century’s most widely recognised and loved works, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), which realised $90.3 million in November 2018 to become one of the most expensive works of art by a living artist ever sold at auction
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David Hockney (b. 1937), Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), painted in 1972. Acrylic on canvas. 84 x 120 in (213.5 x 305 cm). Sold for $90,312,500 on 15 November 2018 at Christie’s in New York © David Hockney
One of the most iconic images in the artist’s oeuvre, David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) is a story of two compositions. The first, started in 1971, was inspired by the serendipitous juxtaposition of two photographs on the artist’s studio floor. ‘One was of a figure swimming underwater and therefore quite distorted… the other was a boy gazing at something on the ground,’ Hockney would later recall. ‘The idea of painting two figures in different styles appealed so much that I began the painting immediately.’
The initial work was ultimately destroyed by the artist after months of working and reworking — as documented in Jack Hazan’s film A Bigger Splash — but in April 1972 Hockney decided to return to the concept ahead of a planned exhibition at New York’s André Emmerich Gallery, which was due to open just four weeks later.
Preparatory photograph for Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), Le Nid-du-Duc, 1972 © David Hockney
Armed with his Pentax camera, Hockney travelled to a villa outside Saint-Tropez, where he staged hundreds of photographs following his original composition using an assistant and friend in an idyllic pool setting.
Returning to his London studio, Hockney composed the poolside photographs, along a selection of photographs of his former lover, Peter Schlesinger wearing the same pink jacket in Kensington Gardens, across his studio wall. Taking cues from the assemblage, he worked 18 hours a days for two weeks solid, finishing the painting the night before the shippers came to transport it to New York. ‘I must admit I loved working on that picture,’ he would recall of that fortnight, ‘working with such intensity; it was marvellous doing it, really thrilling.’
In London Hockney took photographs of his partner, Peter Schlesinger, in Kensington Gardens, from which he also worked to create the pink-jacketed figure standing at the pool’s edge. Film still from A Bigger Splash, 1974. Photo: Jack Hazan / Buzzy Enterprises Ltd
Hockney’s iconic swimming pool motif also arrived by something of an accident. ‘I came to Los Angeles for two reasons,’ he said in 2009. ‘The first was a photo by Julius Shulman of Case Study House #21, and the other was AMG’s Physique Pictorial.’ The house in question is a fluid, mid-century modernist glass and steel building nestled in the Hollywood Hills, while Physique Pictorial was a male fitness publication known for homoerotic photography.
While on the final approach to Los Angeles, Hockney was struck by what he saw. ‘I looked down to see blue swimming pools all over, and I realised that a swimming pool in England would have been a luxury, whereas here they are not.’ Without realising it, he had discovered his greatest subject matter, and LA’s pools would become the setting for many of his major works of the 1960s and ’70s.
Property from a Distinguished Private Collector. David Hockney (b. 1937), Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), painted in 1972. Acrylic on canvas. 84 x 120 in (213.5 x 305 cm). Sold for $90,312,500 on 15 November 2018 at Christie’s in New York
The Yorkshireman was in his mid-twenties, and the city’s private backyard swimming pools provided him with a space in which he was free to explore the male figure — in both real and pictorial terms. Painting these pools, however, initially troubled Hockney.
‘It is an interesting formal problem; it is a formal problem to represent water, to describe water, because it can be anything. It can be any colour and it has no set visual description,’ Hockney has said. ‘[The pool paintings] were about the surface of the water, the very thin film, the shimmering two-dimensionality.’
Hockney worked 18 hours a day non-stop for two weeks to finish his painting, finally completing it the night before it was due to be shipped to New York. Film still from A Bigger Splash, 1974 (present lot in progress illustrated). Photo: Jack Hazan / Buzzy Enterprises Ltd. Artwork: © David Hockney
Hockney’s earliest California works from 1964 depict water as inky splashes of blue and grey, before shifting to more characteristic planes of blue broken by tangled lines. Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool and Sunbather, both from 1966, make use of white, yellow, pink and purple squiggles to suggest the movement of the water in a Pop-like manner, while the 1967 work A Bigger Splash contrasts a flat field of blue against white sprays of paint to indicate a recently submerged diver.
Hockney also experimented with depicting water in various media including acrylics, watercolours, crayons and lithographs, as well as his later technique of pressing dyed, wet paper pulp into sheets of paper.
Hockney even went so far as to paint the floor of his own LA pool with the same ripple motifs he had become known for
In the 1970s and ’80s Hockney even went so far as to paint the floor of his own LA pool with a mural of the same kind of pink and blue apostrophe-shaped ripple motifs he had become known for; as well as the pool at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, which provided the glamorous denizens of LA with the opportunity to become the subject of their own Hockney pool painting.
As a culmination of Hockney’s most iconic motifs, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) has become one of his most celebrated and recognisable images. In addition to being the subject of Hazan’s film it has appeared in numerous retrospectives, and in 2017 was the cover image for the catalogue accompanying Tate Britain’s retrospective, David Hockney (which toured to the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Met in New York). The show attracted almost half a million people, becoming Tate’s most visited exhibition ever.
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‘David Hockney’s brilliance as an artist is on full display with this monumental canvas, which encapsulates the essence of the idealised poolside landscape, and the tremendous complexity that exists within human relationships.’ says Alex Rotter, Chairman, 20th/21st Century Art.
With this painting Hockney cemented his placement within the realm of history’s most venerated artists, when on 15 November 2018 he became the most valuable living artist ever sold at auction.
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Part 3: Paint Like Alma Thomas
- Take students step-by-step through Alma Thomas’s process. Like Thomas, they will first create a watercolor study and then do their final artwork in acrylic paint.
- Select the subject: Pick something from nature. This can be a rainbow, a flower, the sun, trees — anything they’d like!
- Sketch: Using a pencil, sketch out the object from nature on watercolor paper.
- Create the mosaic: Draw equally spaced boxes in the object. Students can choose if they would also like to fill up their background with boxes or keep it a solid color.
- Teacher note: You could have them do this free-hand or with a ruler and measure their boxes (for either the study and/or the final painting).
- Option: Students can rip up colored paper and tape it to their sketch. Allow them to move colors around as Thomas would have done.
- Note: Like Thomas’s study, the watercolor paints will bleed together and make the boxes less defined. In the final acrylic painting, the paint will bleed together less and allow for more defined mosaic-like boxes.
Reflect:
- Have students reflect on their experience creating art based on Alma Thomas’s artistic process. They can share out or write down their reflections.
- Describe your painting using at least two of the vocabulary words learned:
- Abstract
- Pattern
- Rhythm
- Mosaic
- Vertical
Visual Context
Here are some artwork and images to further contextualize the content of the lesson. You can incorporate the images into your lessons or use them to build your own background knowledge.
Please note: Images are available to download only for personal, noncommercial use. For any questions about image rights and reproductions, please contact [email protected].
Additional Context
Lesson Context
Alma Thomas was a Black artist and teacher from Washington, DC. Thomas was a part of the Washington Color School, a 1950s-1970s art movement in response to Abstract Expressionism; the artists used bold colors to form simple, flat shapes, stripes, and fields of color, rather than focusing on emotion, gesture, and movement. Thomas differed from many other Washington Color School artists, whose works did not reference any objects from real life; instead, her works combined the bold colors and shapes from the Washington Color School with the emotion and dynamism of the Abstract Expressionists.
Thomas was inspired by what she saw in the natural world, current events, space, and space exploration. Space was of particular interest for Thomas because of its relevance during the late 1950s through the 1970s. During this time, the world saw humans go to space for the first time. In 1969, three U.S. astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, were chosen by NASA to head into space on Apollo 11. Armstrong became the first human to step on the moon.
To capture the wonder, energy, and excitement that she witnessed in the world, Thomas developed a unique artistic process that involved vibrant colors as well as abstract and repeated shapes to depict the beauty in what she observed. She often sketched in pencil and watercolor and used that as a guide before creating her final pieces on canvas with acrylic paint.
Key Terms
Abstract: A style of art that does not look realistic.
Concentric circles: Circles that ripple out and share the same center.
Mosaic: Pattern or image made of small pieces of materials, such as colored stone or glass.
Pattern: Shapes, lines, or colors that repeat.
Rhythm: The movement of a piece of art. Movement can be created by how the artist uses lines and patterns.
Vertical: Lines that go up and down (or top to bottom).
Washington Color School: a 1950s-1970s art movement in response to Abstract Expressionism; the artists used bold colors to form simple, flat shapes, stripes, and fields of color, rather than focusing on emotion, gesture, and movement.
Watercolor: Paint that is thinned with water, giving the artwork a more transparent color.
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- Describe your painting using at least two of the vocabulary words learned:
