“Yesterday evening Mrs. Arundel insisted on my going to the window, and looking at the glorious sky, as she called it.

Of course I had to look at it. She is one of those absurdly pretty Philistines to whom one can deny nothing.

And what was it? It was simply a very second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad period, with all the painter’s worst faults exaggerated and over-emphasised.”

Oscar Wilde ‘The Decay of Lying’ 1889

Just as it may be hard for some of us to see a sunset without thinking of Turner, the moment I’m under Californian sunshine, I find it impossible not think of Hockney. While Turner painted and scratched and scraped at his canvases until his subject was all but lost in a proto-Impressionist dazzle of gamboge, Hockney did the opposite. His simplified, shadowless settings with their saturated colours are crystal clear. The sun that blinded the former, makes the latter forensic.

JMW Turner, Sunset over a Lake 1840; David Hockney, Pool and Steps 1971

Turner once declared that ‘vagueness [was] his forte,’ and filled his canvases accordingly with haze and mist and cloud and steam; but for Hockney in California, under the constant blue and cloudless sky, the air is dry as bone and all-revealing.

When I arrive, wildfires are consuming the countryside at a rate of an acre a second. A Turneresque pall of smoke hangs over Los Angeles and everyone is glued to the weather reports.

When the rain finally comes, we worry about mudslides instead.

iPad sketches

But how should I paint California?

Despite trips to Santa Barbara to the West and Santa Monica to the East in six lanes of traffic with the glittering Pacific on one side and the Santa Ynez mountains on the other, I just don’t know.

Wayne Thiebaud knows. His California is just as colourful and syrupy as his cakes and jellies. And Edward Hopper’s, unsurprisingly, is as enigmatic and empty of humanity and all its trappings as it is possible to be.

Even after three days of tranquil reflection on a big ranch in the wilds of the Lompoc Valley – although I enjoy doodling on my iPad – I still don’t really know.

Back in Carpinteria, the acrid smell of asphalt is sometimes in our nostrils. Along the vast, deserted beach, sticky puddles of jet black form on the sand. Beyond the burgeoning seal colony with its nursery of thirty pups, the two million year-old tar pit is still a hazard. On the glittering Pacific, three miles out, oil rigs perch on the horizon like ominous sentinels, while plovers, curlews and egrets hunt for shellfish in the waves and the freight train to San Diego rattles and blares its way along the single track that borders the beach. At six a.m. one day, after a sonic boom startles us all awake, I go outside to see the exhaust plume of a SpaceX rocket, hanging in the sky like the glowing entrails of a giant sea creature. Up and down the canyon, dogs bark into the still morning, now pungent with the aroma of cannabis from a neighbouring farm. By the time we get to San Francisco and a driverless car stops for us at a crosswalk before moving silently on, I realise that I’m no closer to my version of California at all.

And that is how I wind up in Rebecca’s garden, to lose myself amongst the trees instead.

Tiburon Early Morning, The Choke Cherry, The Sycamore, all oil on board

(with grateful thanks to Rebecca L Stebbins for her kindness, generosity and support)