How did David Hockney portray Southern California swimming-pool culture after moving to Los Angeles?

After moving to Los Angeles, David Hockney became fascinated by the city’s intense, glaring light and its "California modern" aesthetic, which heavily influenced his depictions of swimming pools, showers, and domestic scenes.1

His portrayal of Southern California pool culture often emphasized a sense of stillness, tranquil luminosity, and casual elegance. In iconic works like A Bigger Splash (1967), Hockney utilized flat, rectilinear shapes and acrylic paint applied with rollers to capture the desolation and quiet of a midday scene outside a Modernist home. These compositions frequently featured a disciplined, almost empty environment where human presence was minimized, focusing instead on the interplay of light and the artificiality of the setting.21

Hockney’s pool paintings were deeply autobiographical, often incorporating friends, lovers, and his own living quarters into the imagery. By blending a frank, mundane realism with the stylistic sensibilities of Pop art, he transformed the swimming pool into a central motif that captured the unique atmosphere and recreational lifestyle of Southern California.12