In the manner of David Hockney
British, b. 1937
Electric Car, Canyon Road, 2026
Acrylic on canvas
152 × 228 cm
Never painted.
Commissioned for the collection, 2026.
PAB 2026.24.2
A small white electric car takes the bends of a coast road between lime hills, an orange slope and a violet ridge, with a blue sea below and an agave in the corner. You can tell it makes no noise. Hockney painted the winding roads of the Hollywood hills as a map you could drive with your eye. The car is quiet enough to hear the colours.
The brief
A small white electric car on a winding road through stylised hills in lime, orange and violet under a flat blue sky. Contemporary painting in flat bright acrylic, clean Californian sunlight, saturated turquoise, pink, lime and yellow, simplified forms with crisp edges, patterned water and foliage, a calm sense of leisure and space, flat colour with occasional wobbly hand-drawn line, slight digital-drawing smoothness. Museum photograph of the acrylic painting, bright even lighting, no frame, no text, no wall, no floor, cropped to the canvas edge.
Written to the house rules. The painter's name does not appear.
Take it home
The painting on this room's wall, at its own proportions, nothing written on it.
