Fine Art

David Hockney’s 'Paper Pools': Capturing Water, Light and Movement

1 August 2026

Alice Strang

David Hockney’s fascination with the swimming pool found new expression in his Paper Pools project. We explore the ideas behind the series and take a closer look at Pool made with Paper and Blue Ink for Book.

The swimming pool is one of the defining motifs of David Hockney’s work. After moving to Los Angeles in 1964, the open spaces, bright light and sensuous urban lifestyle of southern California influenced his work and were explored through the leitmotif of its numerous visually striking outdoor, private swimming pools.

Beyond their associations with the sunlit, affluent and carefree world of southern California, swimming pools presented Hockney with an intriguing artistic challenge: how to depict the movement of water and the effect of light upon and through it.

Discover more about David Hockney

Renowned for his contributions to painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, and stage design, Hockney is celebrated as one of the most influential British artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.

David Hockney and the Swimming Pool

For Hockney, representing water was not simply a question of subject matter. Its constantly changing appearance presented a formal problem: water can shift in colour, movement and appearance depending on its surroundings and the light.

In the swimming pool pictures, I had become interested in the more general problem of painting the water, finding a way to do it, an interesting formal problem, really, apart from its subject matter; it is a formal problem to represent water, to describe water, because it can be anything – it can be any colour it’s movable it has no set visual description.

David Hockney quoted in Richard Lloyd, Hockney Printmaker, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 2014, p.29.

The Paper Pools Project

This fascination lay at the heart of Hockney’s Paper Pools series, which he began in 1978 using coloured and pressed paper pulp.

The project allowed Hockney to return to the familiar subject of the swimming pool while exploring its formal possibilities through a different process and material. Water, with its shifting surface and lack of a fixed visual description, became an opportunity to experiment with colour, pattern, movement and light.

The project was subsequently brought together in Paper Pools, by David Hockney, edited by Nikos Stangos and published by Thames & Hudson in 1980.

A limited edition of the book was accompanied by Pool made with Paper and Blue Ink for Book.

Pool made with Paper and Blue Ink for Book

Pool made with Paper and Blue Ink for Book epitomises the imagery of sunlit, affluent and carefree southern California for which David Hockney is, arguably, most celebrated.

A deceptively sophisticated composition sees the diving board set at an oblique angle along the top of the image, its shadow distorted through the breeze-blown, rippling water to fall on the pool’s side and floor.

Patterning, of tiles and upon the water’s surface, is combined with a high-pitched palette which relays not only heat but the careful maintenance of the surrounding garden, as signified by the glimpse of clipped lawn.

DAVID HOCKNEY (BRITISH 1937-2026)

POOL MADE WITH PAPER AND BLUE INK FOR BOOK (MCA TOKYO 234; TYLER 269)

Capturing Light and Movement in Water

The viewer is invited to imagine the feeling of heat on the soles of their feet as they prepare to dive and the sensation of cool relief when disrupting the water on entry into the pool. Even the lower edge of the plate undulates in parallel with the movement of the water.

The image distils the artistic problem explored throughout Hockney’s Paper Pools: how to describe something as mutable as water in a still image.

Through pattern, colour and the distortion of the diving board’s shadow, Hockney turns the movement of the pool itself into the subject, while retaining the immediacy and sensory appeal of his celebrated vision of southern California.

Specialist

Alice Strang

Associate Director, Senior Fine Art Specialist

Specialist

Kirstie Davidson

Head of Prints & Multiples | London

Department