David Hockney ‘Paper Pools’ fetches record price at recent Stephan Welz & Co auction

The Paper Pools were not created as conventional editions of identical impressions. That would have been an impossibility, given that each one had to be improvised with the coloured pulp within the broad outlines of the moulds. Every single picture is thus a unique variant, one moreover that exploits to the full the delicious materiality of the medium. One of the great joys of this prolonged experiment, which was to have a permanent impact on Hockney’s later exploitation of bold forms and intense colour, was the natural marriage with a subject that had preoccupied him in his first swimming pool paintings 14 years earlier: the refraction of light through gently moving water. The opportunity to depict water through a medium that was itself literally fluid led him to find new and often visually witty solutions to problems of depiction that had preoccupied him for so long, and through this joyous experience to reinvent his art as a life-affirming spectacle infused in a succulent, almost technicolour, brilliance.