"He was excited to see these paintings in a different way," Gomez says. Weschler says Hockney was completely charmed and impressed by Gomez. "Next thing you know, we're driving up to the Hollywood hills up to Mulholland Drive through Laurel Canyon to meet him," Gomez recalls. Weschler has written extensively about Hockney and thought he'd make an introduction. He puts another gardener raking a grassy lawn that Hockney had shown being watered. He substitutes leaf-blowing gardeners for wealthy Hockney art collectors. Gomez does riffs on several Hockney paintings. Gomez, who is 29, knows that from his years working as a nanny in LA in the expensive house where he worked he watched other servants come and go.Ĭourtesy of Abrams Gomez makes life-size cardboard cutouts of laborers - such as this "gardener" on North Beverly Drive - and leaves them on manicured lawns. "The painting itself was originally going to be called Thursday Afternoon," Gomez explains, "because those are the times that the pool cleaner and the housekeeper would come into the space." And over toward the back, a woman - she's faceless, like all his figures - sweeps the patio near a wall of windows. In Gomez's version, the water darkens to cobalt and instead of a splash there's a man cleaning the pool. In A Bigger Splash, Hockney shows turquoise water in a big pool with a diving board and a big splash of water. The famous English artist began painting rich LA in the 1960s. The first Gomez painting to catch Weschler's eye was a nearly precise reproduction of a work by David Hockney. There's that guy over there, there's that guy, and that lady that's there. "He'll just say 'Eight.' I'll say, 'Eight what?' He says, 'There's eight workers I can see in my line of vision. "I can be walking along with him," Weschler says. The artist always has laborers in his range of sight, Weschler says. He's done a long essay on Gomez for the new coffee table book Domestic Scenes. These images show "the lush, easy lifestyle of L.A., which is entirely undergirded by armies of domestic workers," says New Yorker magazine writer Lawrence Weschler. Courtesy of Abrams Gomez takes ads for luxury products and imagines the individuals who make them possible.
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