Two Peppers
Signed Print

While Hockney is perhaps best known for his still lifes of flowers, Two Peppers is an elegant study of vegetables, although they have been improbably placed on a sheet in empty space, rather than being shown on a cutting board or in a bowl. Here the peppers become an object lesson, allowing the artist to demonstrate the effects of light on their tough and brightly coloured skin and their slightly rippled surface. While the work is an intaglio it could almost be a drawing made with coloured pencil; the marks are delicate and the shading of the shadow filled with a lightness we don’t usually associate with printing ink. As with many of Hockney’s other prints he has used cross hatching to shade in the background, however here, with the air of careful precision that suffuses the work, the effect is that of the kind of graph paper used in technical drawing, lending the scene some structure and rigidity in its almost grid like effect. The composition is also interesting as it occupies the lower two thirds of the sheet. As is common in many of Hockney's prints, much is left bare and the white space is used to striking effect to offset the subject itself.