Acrylic paint is pigment held in a liquid plastic, an acrylic resin, that thins with water and dries in minutes. Once dry, it no longer dissolves in water.
It is a twentieth-century medium: the first acrylic made for artists dates from the 1940s, and the water-based tubes went on sale in the 1950s. One of the best-known pictures made with it is A Bigger Splash, painted in 1967 by the British artist David Hockney.
A Bigger Splash shows a corner of Los Angeles on a cloudless day: a low modern house, two tall palm trees, an empty chair, a yellow diving board, and a pool with a burst of white water where someone has just dived in. Hockney had settled in the city a few years earlier.
He chose acrylic on purpose, and its speed was the reason. Each coat dried within minutes, so he could lay down large areas of a single color first, the sky, the wall of the house, the pool, and then add the details on top without smudging what lay underneath.
He also felt that acrylic suited the sunlit, clean-edged suburbs of California better than oil paint, and the house in the picture is one of them, all straight lines and hard shadows.
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The splash in the middle of the pool is the one place where Hockney slowed down. In his own words, he painted it "in a very, very slow way," over about two weeks, for a burst of water that lasts about two seconds in real life.
His model was a photograph taken by someone else, which he had come across in a book on pool construction. With small brushes, he copied its shapes, its transparency and every one of its drips.
The rest of the canvas was painted fast. Hockney stapled it to a wall and made no preliminary drawing.
He rolled on the sky, the building and the pool, two or three coats each, so that the color would be opaque. Only the trees, the grass, the chair and the reflections in the windows got a fine brush.
A name taken from a sharp smell
The paint Hockney rolled across that sky takes its name from a chemistry laboratory, not from a studio…
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