David Hockney · A Bigger Splash

1967 – Acrylic paint on canvas – Tate Britain

Tate Gallery www.tate.org.uk © David Hockney

David Hockney is one of the living legends of Pop Art. Born in Great Britain, he moved to California in 1964, where he immediately fell in love with the light, the culture and the urban landscape of the West Coast. “A bigger splash” is possibly his most famous work, and also one of the most audacious, if we consider the difficulty of painting an event –the splash- that lasts only for a few seconds. Hockney explained the work with these words: “It took me two weeks to paint an event that lasts two seconds”.

“A bigger splash” takes us to a calm, sunny day in California, and the observer may be tempted to see the painting through good sunglasses. Hockney places us next to a swimming pool, in the middle of a calm scene composed solely of horizontal and vertical lines, with the exception of the diagonal formed by the springboard. The artist has caught the precise moment in which a person we can not see jumps into the water, forming a great splash that momentarily breaks the almost sacred calm of the scene. We can almost hear the exuberant sound of the splash while the smooth and fresh breeze caresses our back.

Text: G. Fernández, theartwolf.com