Figures with Still Life 1976 - 1977

David Hockney made this print, "Figures with Still Life," using etching, a medium where the process is super visible. Look at the colours: red and blue, simple, direct, like a child's drawing, and the shapes are laid bare. You see the scaffolding. It’s like he’s showing you how the sausage is made. The table, for example, is made up of thousands of tiny blue hatched lines and the figure on the left is built up out of planes of red line. It’s this layering and hatching that gives the image a wonderful sense of depth. Hockney once spoke of Picasso’s influence on his work, describing him as doing it all, ‘re-inventing seeing.’ I think that’s something that speaks to this image too; this is Hockney making us see in a new way. It is a conversation between artists, a dance across time.