David Hockney, “Lightning”, 1973, Lithograph and Screenprint in Colors on Wove Paper

In 1965, David Hockney worked on “A Hollywood Collection”, a suite of prints, with master printer Ken Tyler, who ran the printmaking studio Gemini Graphic Editions Limited in Los Angeles, California. Although Hockney made other prints with Gemini in the years between 1965 and 1973, “The Weather Series”, which contains the print “Lightning”, was the second major suite made there. It is in part inspired by the representation of weather in Japanese prints. This image however also suggests 18th and 19th century European depictions of landscape and weather, with overtones of the caricature style of Hogarth.

In tackling weather as a subject, David Hockney looked to 19th-century Japanese u-kioye woodblock prints by Katsushika Hokusai and impressionist paintings by Claude Monet. Both artists depicted a wide range of atmospheric and lighting conditions in serial formats—Hokusai most famously in his prints of Mount Fuji and Monet in his well-known paintings of grain stacks, and other subjects.

The “Weather Series” suite contains six prints illustrating the subjects of rain, snow, wind, mist, sun, and lightning.  Hockney’s “Snow” , in which repetitive horizontal bands of tonal gradation suggest spatial recession, is most explicitly indebted to Japanese woodcuts, while the hazy silhouettes of Hockney’s “Mist” recall Monet’s painting of poplar trees on the River Epte. Hockney’s “Wind” illustrates the serial relationship between “The Weather Series” prints, as the weather elements in the “Snow”, “Mist”, “Sun”, and “Rain” prints are shown whirling in a Los Angeles gust.