David Hockney: A Life in Colour

The Church Tower and the Clock shows Hockney at his most precise and economical. The etchings in this series are among the great early achievements of his print career. 

Between May and November 1969, Hockney made thirty-nine etchings to illustrate six reimagined Grimm fairy tales: The Little Sea Hare, Fundevogel, Rapunzel, The Boy Who Left Home to Learn Fear, Old Rinkrank and Rumpelstilzchen. Drawn directly onto copper plates, the works give new life to these traditional stories in a language that is profoundly his own, moving between the farcical and the grotesque, the comic and the earnest, the profane and the art-historical. In The Church Tower and the Clock, a tower, a clock and a vertical pull of architecture are enough to create atmosphere. The image is sparse, but no line is wasted.

The Los Angeles 1984 Olympic Games poster, published in 1982, takes the pool into another phase of Hockney’s thinking. Created to celebrate the 1984 Olympic Games, it formed part of a project for which the Olympic Committee commissioned fifteen nationally known artists to create original designs promoting the event. Hockney’s contribution returns to one of his great subjects - the swimming pool - but places it within a language of movement, performance and public spectacle.

Around this period, he was deeply engaged with photography and photo-collage, challenging the fixed viewpoint of the single camera image. The result is complex: a poster that speaks to California, sport, photography and the shifting nature of the image. Hand-signed examples in this condition are exceptionally scarce, with fewer than 200 believed to exist.

Dancing Flowers belongs to Hockney’s celebrated Home-Made Prints, a series born from his experiments with a friend’s photocopier. He quickly recognised that the machine could be used as a printmaking tool, with each colour drawn separately, printed in sequence, and layered back through the copier in a process similar to traditional colour printing. However, the results were different to anything else in his graphic work: matte, richly toned and technically unforgiving. Unlike traditional printmaking inks, which often carry a glossy finish, the copier’s powdered ink was bonded to the paper with heat, creating a very different surface.

Over the course of the year, Hockney made thirty-three Home-Made Prints, many in smaller editions than originally planned because corrections were almost impossible. The series is a brilliant example of the restless innovation that characterises his career, transforming everyday technology into a serious artistic medium. Limited by the standardised paper sizes accepted by the machine, Hockney was also pushed towards composite images, an approach he would later explore on a much larger scale. In this sense, the Home-Made Prints not only stand as a remarkable body of work in their own right, but also anticipate the digital drawings he would later make on the iPad.