As I flew over San Bernadino and saw the swimming pools and the houses … I was more thrilled than I have ever been in arriving in any city,” the late British artist David Hockney said of moving to Los Angeles in 1964.Hockney was born in Bradford, northern England, where homes had neither backyard pools nor Californian sun. Both would become trademarks of the hugely popular and prolific artist, who died in London last month, triggering an outpouring of reflection and remembrance that extended far beyond the art world.Hockney completed his first pool paintings the year he arrived in America. He met artist Peter Schlesinger, his lover and favourite model, two years later. Both feature in Portrait of an Artist (Pool with two Figures), from 1972, a painting completed after their break-up. In Schlesinger, Hockney found “the real-life embodiment of the West Coast dream boy”, curator Sarah Howgate once wrote.A viewer looks at David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), which set a record for a work sold at auction by a living artist in 2018.NYTIn the painting, Schlesinger stands at the pool’s edge, while another man swims towards him beneath the water’s veiled surface. In 2018, it sold for $US90 million, setting what was then a record for a work sold at auction by a living artist.Pool paintings, including Peter getting out of Nick’s Pool (1966), A Bigger Splash (1967) and even the artist’s own backyard pool in the Hollywood Hills – the bottom of which he painted with gestural blue brush marks mimicking the sunlit surface of the water above – captured Hockney’s embrace of California’s sunny and liberating ’60s lifestyle, one far removed from stifling and damp post-war Britain.A viewer stands between Hockney’s A Bigger Splash (left) and A Lawn Being Sprinkled.Getty Images“David not only immortalised Los Angeles but forever changed the way we look at swimming pools,” Barry Humphries wrote in 2016, when his portrait hung in a Hockney exhibition at London’s Royal Academy.The pair were also friends, but Hockney had been particularly close to Humphries’ father-in-law, the English poet Stephen Spender, whose daughter, actress and playwright Lizzie Spender, was Humphries’ fourth wife. Hockney had designed the invitations to her 21st birthday party.“The swimming pool, unlike the pond, reflects light,” Hockney once wrote. “Those dancing lines I used to paint on the pools are really the surface of the water. I liked to think of it as a kind of rippling, moving mirror.”Hockney forever changed the way we look at swimming pools, Barry Humphries wrote, including this one at LA’s Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.John SaxbyIn 1988, Hockney reportedly arrived at LA’s storied Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel – home in 1929 to the first Academy Awards ceremony – holding a can of blue paint and a six-inch paint brush tied to a broom handle. He painted the same “dancing lines” he’d applied to his pool at home to the bottom of the hotel’s Tropicana pool. They’re still there. Or restored and repainted versions at least. Pool chemicals are no friend of forever.The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel is steeped in LA and film industry folklore.John SaxbySwimming in the pool today is like diving into one of Hockney’s paintings. The ephemeral effect of Californian sunlight dancing on the water is fixed in dark blue brushstrokes on the pool floor. The surrounding palm trees, long a symbol of LA, are reflected in its surface, as is the low-rise modern architecture of the hotel’s adjoining Tropicana Bar and Cabana suites. The artist once described painting water as a great challenge. But also “a nice problem”. Spending time in the pool as a hotel guest and Hockney groupie presented a similar dilemma: the water was freezing.Unlike the down-at-heel neighbourhood that surrounds its Hollywood Boulevard address, the Roosevelt Hotel has retained much of its old-world Hollywood glamour. Having one of the most recognisable hotel pools in the world, painted by one the world’s most influential and admired artists, no doubt helps.But the hotel has long been a magnet for generations of Hollywood celebrities, from Clark Gable and Carole Lombard – after whom the penthouse is named – to Marilyn Monroe, who did her first professional magazine shoot on the diving board while a resident in the 1950s. One of the Cabana suites (rumoured to be haunted by her ghost), is named in her honour. In May, Glamour magazine shot Sydney Sweeney on the roof.The artist used a brush tied to a broom handle to paint the hotel pool’s floor.