A Bigger Interior with Blue Terrace

A blaze of blue floorboards stretches across this 2017 painting by David Hockney, drawing your gaze past a fan of railings toward a garden bursting with green. The terrace feels cool and calm, while the plants beyond seem to buzz with life, thick with leaves and pattern. Hockney has always adored strong color, and here he lets the two worlds play off each other, the restful blue against the restless jungle of foliage.

Something feels slightly off about the space, and that is entirely on purpose. The floor tips up toward you, the railings splay out at strange angles, and the whole room seems to wrap around your view. Hockney believed we never really see a room from a single frozen spot, since our eyes are always wandering. So he bends the rules of perspective to match how it actually feels to stand somewhere and glance around, an idea he picked up in part from Picasso and the Cubists but made warm and welcoming instead of tricky.

In his eighties when he made this, the British artist was still working with the same delight that had fueled him for over sixty years. From the glittering California swimming pools that made his name to these later dreamlike interiors, Hockney kept chasing the pleasure of looking, blurring the boundary between inside and out until the two happily blend together.