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Softground etching and aquatint (from one plate) with hand coloring in ink (black) on white Hahnemühle mould made paper. Signed by the artist with initials lower left, dated 85, and numbered 100/100 lower center in pencil. Hodgkin produced this work after a visit to David Hockney in Los Angeles.
Most Hodgkin works are abstract, but usually contain observational gestures: a room viewed from above becomes a grouping of soft shapes. Here, a palm tree is simplified into a curved chevron blended like charcoal, and the pool, filled with hazy scribbles, is neatly crenelated by saturated squares of pigment. Staccato daubs of ink recall a lawn, augmented by sweeping drybrush that frames the composition in pale grey.
David’s Pool at Night evinces the increase in emotional content and intensity in Hodgkin’s work after the late 1970s. His marks are more fluid and lush due to an increased looseness of handling. These later works show a richness and a surface texture previously lacking – mainly due to the application of gouache or watercolor by hand but also to the more tonal techniques of aquatint and soft-ground etching with chalk-like lines.
