Evenbeforethen,heinsisted
thathisphotographiccollagesof
the1980sbelongedtothecategory
of“drawing”,not“photography”.
Why?Because,Hockneyargues,
it involveslinkingoneelementwith
anotherinspace.“Ifyouglueone
imagehere,andonetherethenit
fixesthepositionofanotherone
there.”Consequently,despitebeing
assembledfromthesamesetofphotographs,thetwoversionsof
PearblossomHighwaymadein
1986 endeduplookingrather
differentbecausethereis no
singlewaytojointhem.
“Ifyoumakea decisionlikethat,”
Hockneyargues,“isn’tthatexactly
whatyouaredoingwhenyouare
drawing?”It followsthat,inhisview,
thereis a verylargeoverlapbetween
paintinganddrawing.Indeed,heevenI’m just a man who likes to
draw... At night I’d go to bed
planning what I was going
to do next
LEFT David Hockney,
Self-Portrait with
Red Braces, 2003,
watercolour on
paper, 61 x46cmsuggests that the fact that Francis
Bacon couldn’t draw very well limited
what he could do as a painter.
One of Hockney’s axioms is that
“there’s always another way to do it”.
The corollary is that each graphic tool- charcoal, colour-crayon, screen,
reed pen – offers certain possibilities,
but also has particular limitations.
Hockney’s wonderful portrait
drawings of the late 1960s and early
1970s, for example, were made with
a radiograph pen, which produced
a razor-sharp line (and just a line –
there were no shadows or tonal
shading in them).
Hockney would start with the
sitter’s head, almost always with
the eyes. And then, he remembered,
“once you’ve started, you’ve to draw
it all at once”. The whole sitting would
only last for perhaps 40 minutes.
It was tense, and he felt that tension
came out in the line, “because you
are both looking and thinking all
kinds of things”. The aim was to distil
an essence into a series of ultra-thin
ink marks.
In contrast, the iPhone drawings - many done while lying in bed in
Bridlington, gazing at the sun rise
through the window and the flowers
on the sill – imposed a different set of
choices. What marks could be made,
given the limitations of the palette
offered by the apps and the discipline
of working with a finger on a screen
the size of a postcard? This new
medium, Hockney felt, forced him
to be loose and free.
In the early 1980s, when Hockney
was designing the production for a
triple bill at the Metropolitan Opera
in New York featuring music by Erik
Satie, Francis Poulenc and Maurice
Ravel, it struck him that the thing the
great painters of the French school - David Hockney
© DAVID HOCKNEY. PHOTO CREDIT: RICHARD SCHMIDT