“I have never thought of my painting as advanced, but I wanted to be involved, if only peripherally, with modernism,” says Hockney. Bora Bora was painted in 1979, a year after the artist moved to the Hollywood Hills. The light and ease of the Los Angeles lifestyle, which he had explored in his early paintings, can be felt in this work, which captures the swaying palm trees and lapping blue seas of the French Polynesian island in a few fluid strokes.  

Summing up his deceptively simple approach, Hockney says, “Drawing makes your eyes see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache.”  

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