Name: Dog Days
Brand: David Hockney
Rating: 4.9 (183 reviews)

Meaning & Analysis

This signed photographic print is by venerated British artist, David Hockney. Part of the artist’s Photographs collection, it depicts him sitting in an armchair with two dachshunds – his dogs Stanley and Boodgie – the subject of a painting series completed between 1994 and 1995.

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This signed photographic print by much-loved British artist David Hockney was produced in 1993 – a year in which the artist created a series of over 40 paintings of his dachshunds, Stanley and Boodgie. Several of these paintings were published in the 1998 book David Hockney’s Dog Days. In this print, entitled Dog Days, Hockney photographs himself sitting in an armchair, holding Stanley and Boodgie – the subjects of this enormous painting series. A testament to the established link between Hockney’s painting and photography – a medium he would often use in order to capture a snapshot of a scene he would later render as a painterly work – this print features many of the artist’s dog paintings, hung on a wall behind him. Much like in Hockney’s famous Photo Collages, works he would often dub ‘joiners’, this print challenges established processes of viewing and producing artworks. Much like the artist’s joiner pieces, there is more than one perspective offered here; the viewer is invited to look at the real life subjects of Hockney’s dog paintings, as well as the way in which they have been interpreted in a different medium. Hockney, sat in an armchair, places himself at the centre of a kind of visual exchange; disrupting the relationship between a subject and its depiction, he is self-referentially positioned in the middle of a lengthy process of viewing, reminding us that although the photograph may be more objective in its representation, along with painting it is always the product of his trained, dynamic eye.