David Hockney’s Three Snakes, completed in 1962 during his final year at the Royal College of Art, represents a pivotal moment in the artist’s early development – marking both his technical sophistication and his conceptual independence. It is a work that not only distinguishes him from his contemporaries but also signals his critical engagement with the dominant art discourses of the period. In Three Snakes, Hockney positions himself in direct conversation with the prevailing aesthetics of post-war abstraction, while simultaneously embedding coded narratives of identity, sexuality, and representation within the formal constraints of painting.

The motif of the snake, deployed here with deliberate ambiguity, serves multiple functions. Formally, it enables Hockney to explore the interplay between flatness and illusion, surface and depth. Symbolically, it operates as a veiled signifier of homoerotic desire. In an era when homosexuality remained criminalised in the United Kingdom, Hockney employed imagery that could communicate private meanings under the guise of abstraction or decorative form. The phallic implications of the snake are difficult to ignore, yet their presentation remains elusive – more suggestive than declarative. The personal resonance of the image is underscored by its connection to Hockney’s then-partner, Mark Berger, who kept snakes as pets. As such, the motif functions simultaneously as autobiographical reference and as a broader commentary on the constraints of expression during a period of legal and social repression.

Crucially, Three Snakes is as much a work about painting as it is about desire. It engages directly with the visual language of American post-painterly abstraction, particularly the work of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. The poured paint techniques and concentric geometries within Three Snakes evoke Louis’s stained canvases and Noland’s chevrons, yet Hockney employs these stylistic devices with a degree of irony. Rather than aspiring to the transcendental or formal purity sought by many abstractionists, Hockney uses their idioms as a critical tool – replicating their visual strategies to destabilise their underlying assumptions. The result is a form of visual mimicry that serves not to align with abstraction, but to question its authority and its claims to universality.

This interrogation of style reflects a broader conceptual shift in Hockney’s thinking, catalysed in part by his exposure to Picasso’s 1960 retrospective at the Tate. For Hockney, style became not a fixed aesthetic position, but a malleable element – something to be experimented with, borrowed, and recontextualised. In this sense, Three Snakes exemplifies his early rejection of artistic essentialism in favour of stylistic plurality and conceptual play. It is a painting that performs its own construction, drawing attention to the conditions of its making and to the ideological frameworks it inhabits.

At a time when the “death of painting” was widely proclaimed, Three Snakes offers a counter-position. Rather than retreat from painting’s historical weight, Hockney re-engages with it on his own terms – adopting, adapting, and ultimately redefining its possibilities. The work stands not only as a bold articulation of queer subjectivity within a coded visual language, but also as a critical rejoinder to the formalist orthodoxy of the period. Through Three Snakes, Hockney demonstrates that painting, far from being exhausted, remains a vital site for experimentation, ambiguity, and subversion.