Soft Celia
Signed Print

A woman sits facing the viewer, her head turned slightly away. Here eyes are wide and her hair softly curled. She wears an elegant, Chinese style jacket and a string of pearls around her neck. Her hands, cut off by the edge of the image appear clasped together in her lap. Dating to 1998 this is a portrait of Celia Birtwell, Hockney’s longtime friend and muse. While she has aged significantly since her earlier portraits by the artist, we can still recognise her distinguished features. The portrait is suffused in intimacy, giving us another clue of the relationship between artist and sitter, and a tenderness which is underscored by the softness of the marks used to render the fashion designer’s likeness. Here, and throughout the series this work belongs to, Hockney employs etchings to achieve a more diffused effect, eschewing the hard lines of earlier series such as A Rake’s Progress or Illustrations For Fourteen Poems By C.P. Cavafy in favour of light shading and more delicate outlines. While many of Hockney’s etchings appear like pages out of his sketchbook, with their fine lines and scratchy marks, here we can feel the artist’s delicate work on the etching plate to achieve this more subtle effect.