Coloured Flowers Made of Paper and Ink
Signed Print

This beautifully graphic work by David Hockney depicts a selection of cut flowers in an elegant glass vase. Poppies, cornflowers and perhaps a kind of daisy spill out, their stems and flowerheads pointing in opposite directions to produce a fan-like effect of blooms. Their soft natural beauty is however contrasted with the harsh grid like background which produces a cross hatch effect as a background, throwing the flowers into relief. On the table in front of the vase lays a selection of coloured pencils, as if to suggest this is the scene of the initial drawing itself or maybe even that Hockney has just finished colouring in the flowers themselves, if they are in fact made of paper as the title suggests. This is one of many depictions of flowers in Hockney’s oeuvre and the still life is a subject he has returned to constantly over the last 60 years, across painting, drawing and printmaking, and yet while he is always in constant dialogue with the masters and traditions that went before him he always manages to subvert the subject to become something modern and something Hockney, adding a layer of enigma or uncertainty to a composition that keeps the viewer guessing.