Dog Etching No. 3
Signed Print

Hockney’s portraits of his friends from the ’70s are among his most famous works in print, however in the ’90s he turned to a different kind of subject. Grieving the loss of many of his friends and lovers to the AIDS crisis he began to focus on his two daschunds, Stanley and Boodgie who were his constant companions. In this series of etchings he portrays them at rest, with all the tenderness and attention he bestowed upon his human subjects. Here we see one of the dogs, its wiry fur rendered in beautiful cross hatched marks that he would have sketched out on the etching plate while drawing from life. The dog is shown sleeping on a cushion, as with many of the other prints in the portfolio, which is seemingly placed on a rug that with its striated lines could also be a body of water. After more than 30 years of using the medium, which he first picked up at the Royal College of Art because it was cheaper than using painting materials, here Hockney shows his mastery of it, employing different styles of marks to bring range to this monochrome work which is suffused with intimacy and tranquility.