Sun
Signed Print

Perhaps the defining characteristic of LA, a place Hockney moved to in order to escape the ‘greyness’ of London, the sun is pervasive in the artist’s paintings and prints from his Californian period. Here we see the west coast sun at its most raking, coming in through a window to create a shower of light on a houseplant as if it were the subject of a renaissance painting. Hockney compared his move to LA to ‘Van Gogh going to Arles’ and it’s easy to see what a profound effect the sun had on his work when you compare works such as this to his earlier and more monochrome etchings or print series such as A Rake’s Progress. Here colour abounds and the yellow of the sun is contrasted with the deep blue of the shutters behind the table. While this appears at first as a still life, we can read it as a pure study of light and atmosphere as part of the artist’s 1973 The Weather series, a portfolio of lithographs and screen prints made in collaboration with the prestigious Gemini workshop. Throughout these works Hockney aimed to capture the ephemeral effects of weather, calling influences from Impressionism to Japanese prints to produce these elegant scenes.