Red Celia
Signed Print

A woman sits in profile, her hands clasped at the back of her head. Her jumper appears like a wash of ink while her eye and hair are marked out by fine lines where the ink has been scored away. A vision in red, this is Celia Birtwell, Hockney’s longtime friend and model, shown here at rest, perhaps listening to or looking at something ‘off screen’. The work is at once intimate and bold, the striking colour palette gives the print a more expressive quality than the more naturalistic tones of Hockney’s other representations of Celia. While perhaps more traditional in style than An Image Of Celia which also belongs to this series, the work does hold an element of the Cubist influence which pervades the Moving Focus portfolio. This can be traced in Celia’s left eye, which is shown in profile to us, closely resembling an eye from a Picaso portrait. With its simple, almost naive style, this feature is in stark contrast to the rest of her face which is rendered in soft tones. The work has all the immediacy of a sketch, catching celia in a pose that perhaps only lasted a few minutes or even seconds, however the lithograph gives it the weight of a painting as the artist’s deft use of ink shows his impressive ability to push the boundaries of his chosen medium.