Hockney is back in London for the early months of the year, but his mind is on the swimming pools of Los Angeles as he completes several paintings from preparatory studies. He returns to the States to teach for the summer at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he works in a confined studio, painting the nearby Rocky [NESTED]Mountains from various reproductions he finds. He is continuing to work in an ever-diversifying vocabulary of styles, mixing academic training, poetic wit, and youthful irreverence, for example, combining figurative painting and awkwardly placed abstract objects in Portrait Surrounded by Artistic Devices.

Indeed, Hockney’s works are often picturing their own frames now - presenting themselves as self-conscious art. In December, the Times notes in its review of his show Pictures with Frames and Still-Life Pictures at John Kasmin’s gallery: “Mr. Hockney has taken one of the few fruitful courses for a figurative painter at a time when virtually all the devices of figurative painting have been found worn out and stale. [NESTED]He uses as his weapons exactly these illusionistic devices, relying on an extremely subtle formal sense to bring them into unexpected relationships, and thus create fresh images. His latest paintings revolve round the idea of the ‘frame,’ and by including the representation of a frame within the painting itself he gives the work another layer of meaning which causes us to ask exactly where reality lies.”

Hockney ends the year by driving cross-country to New York before returning to London by boat. He is accompanied by Patrick Procktor and Bobby Earles, and makes life studies of Earles over the course of the journey, for example Bob Aboard the "France".