It was a perfect sunny day for lounging poolside at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. The sky was a keen pale blue, with that piercing quality familiar in Southern California. The pool, where a man with straight black hair drifted on a pink and green striped raft, was a deeper, cerulean blue.<\/p>\n
It looked a lot like a painting by David Hockney, the British-born L.A. transplant whose death on Thursday<\/a> drew tributes from all corners of the world.<\/p>\n And Hockney had had a hand in this pool. In 1988, already famous, he spent a day here with a paint brush attached to the end of a broom, painting bright blue swooshes on the pool\u2019s bottom. Now, even though many of the marks have faded, the remaining curves powerfully mimic and accentuate the flickering light on the water\u2019s rippled surface.<\/p>\n The pool mural, which I visited on Friday, is one of the many gifts that Hockney has given us as residents of Los Angeles. In his five decades of living here, becoming as he would say an \u201cEnglish Angeleno,\u201d he made his mark on the city in ways both dramatic and subtle, inflecting our image of the California lifestyle as well as influencing generations of artists. His influence is felt not just on the walls of museum, but everywhere.<\/p>\n He moved to the city in 1964 without ever having visited it, drawn in part by the \u201csleazy, sexy hot night-life\u201d he read about in John Rechy\u2019s 1963 novel \u201cCity of Night,\u201d<\/a> he said in a book-length interview<\/a> in 1976. He plunged right in and painted the slickly erotic acrylic painting, \u201cMan in Shower in Beverly Hills.\u201d<\/a> <\/p>\n \u201cHe loved the sunlight, the weather, the boys,\u201d said Richard Benefield<\/a>, a veteran museum executive who served as the first director of the David Hockney Foundation. \u201cL.A. was the place he could go and be completely free; he could be gay and not worry about everything people were so hung up about in the 1960s in the U.K.\u201d<\/p>\n Hockney\u2019s sensuality and hedonism infused his paintings, said Stephanie Barron, department head of modern art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and a three-time sitter for his portraits. \u201cDavid\u2019s 1960s paintings of sparkling pools, manicured lawns and his sunbathing friends have become embedded in the psyche as symbols of Los Angeles, whether accurate or not.\u201d<\/p>\n As Hockney once described the 1960s to Getty curators: \u201cThere were no paintings of Los Angeles. People then didn\u2019t even know what it looked like. And when I was there, they were still finishing up the freeways. I remember seeing within the first week, a ramp of freeway going into the air, and I suddenly thought, my God, this place needs its Piranesi,\u201d he said, comparing himself to the 18th-century Italian artist who documented a fast-changing Rome.<\/p>\n In 1966, Hockney painted \u201cSunbather,\u201d with yellow, stylized lines tracing the looping play of light on the water and echoing the curves of a male sunbather\u2019s buttocks.<\/p>\n The following year, he painted the larger, bolder and strangely clinical work, \u201cA Bigger Splash,\u201d<\/a> where the poolside chair is empty, the pool looms larger than the low-slung midcentury house, and the splash stands in for a missing figure. It soon became the posterchild for a certain stylish-but-alienating lifestyle in L.A. and appeared on the cover of Reyner Banham\u2019s groundbreaking 1971 book, \u201cLos Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies.\u201d For Banham, an architectural historian, the celebrated painting bundled together his notion of \u201cSurfurbia\u201d with the \u201cdream of the good life.\u201d<\/p>\n Hockney would explain to me, in an interview for The Times, that the city fed his appetite for using vivid, saturated colors. \u201cLos Angeles has that effect on me,\u201d he said, smelling faintly of cigarette smoke and dressed in a smart gray suit with a canary-yellow shirt. \u201cThe light there is 10 times brighter than anywhere else. It\u2019s why Hollywood started there. Natural light was essential in 1910 for film.\u201d<\/p>\n At his longtime home in the hills near Mulholland Drive \u2014 the famous ridgeline roadway through the eastern Santa Monica Mountains \u2014 Hockney built his studio on a tennis court and made a wide variety of paintings examining the local foliage and experimenting with multifocal, twisty vistas. His home also became his canvas<\/a> \u2014 or stage set, considering his work for the theater, as he painted walls, railings and more in bright hues. In 1987, he <\/strong>seized the chance to turn his pool into a painting as well, concocting a tangle of wavy cobalt lines on the bottom of his comma-shaped swimming pool, then signing and dating his work <\/strong>when it was done.<\/p>\n He repainted it as needed, even doing so the day before his 80th birthday in the heat of July<\/a>, recalled Benefield. He once proposed that the artist do a show on water \u2014 his pools, puddles and showers included. \u201cHe was more interested in his iPad paintings at the time,\u201d Benefield said.<\/p>\n \u201cDavid embraced new technologies like nobody I know, but at the core of his work was beauty,\u201d Barron said. \u201cI think that he gave many artists permission to engage with the beauty in their immediate surroundings.\u201d<\/p>\n A few artists, including Jonas Wood, managed to wrangle invitations to visit the modern master in his studio. Wood, known for energetic renderings of things close to home, whether flowers or basketballs, said he felt connected to Hockney because of the domestic subject matter \u2014 they both have done their share of dog portraits.<\/p>\n \u201cHe might have been a political person, but he wasn\u2019t a political artist,\u201d said Wood, who painted Hockney\u2019s portrait from a photograph in 2004 and met him a few years later. \u201cHe was capturing the life that he was living and the minute things that became interesting to him, interiors and exteriors.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI love his patterns, his colors and his textile vibes,\u201d Wood continued, comparing Hockney to Vincent van Gogh in \u201cthe repetition of his mark, the squiggle of his mark, the mastery of his line.\u201d<\/p>\n Hockney left Los Angeles for Normandy,<\/strong> France, in 2019, and ended up returning for visits only. \u201cHe told me he left L.A. because he couldn\u2019t smoke at his favorite places anymore,\u201d Wood recalled. \u201cIndoor smoking, outdoor smoking, patio smoking, it all got canceled.\u201d<\/p>\n Talk to anyone who worked with Hockney, and you will hear stories about his incessant cigarette breaks \u2014 and the dispensations obtained so that he could light up during museum installations and openings.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had to get a special permit for him to be able to smoke on the terrace for his \u201882 Portraits and 1 Still-Life\u2019<\/a> show in 2018,\u201d Barron said. \u201cDavid was a lifelong, committed chain smoker and all legislation about smoking irritated him.\u201d<\/p>\n