In the manner of David Hockney
British, b. 1937
Cannonball, Filmed, 2026
Acrylic on canvas
152 × 228 cm
Never painted.
Commissioned for the collection, 2026.
PAB 2026.24.1
Moving, 16-second loop ·
A turquoise pool, a pink house, one palm, and in the middle a huge white splash where someone has just gone in. Nobody is visible: the diver is under water. The only witness is a phone on a tripod in the foreground, filming. Hockney said *A Bigger Splash* took two weeks to paint and the real thing lasts two seconds. The phone gets it in one.
The brief
A turquoise backyard pool, a huge white splash from a cannonball, a phone on a tripod filming it, a pink house and one palm. 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.
