Slow Forest
Signed Print

Filled with inky drips and watery brushmarks, Slow Forest is characteristic of the Some New Prints series which sees Hockney combining lithography and screen printing to produce a portfolio that pushes the limits of printmaking. Made in collaboration with the Gemini print workshop in 1993, this and other works from the series derive from the 1992 series Some New Paintings which in turn were inspired by the sets Hockney was commissioned to design for a production of Richard Strauss’s opera Die Frau Ohne Schatten, or the woman without a shadow, in 1992. Here we see a perhaps more figurative composition compared to many of the more abstract works in the present series, however the forest of the title is still hard to discern. The stalks or trunks, trees or flowers, we are presented with appear less like a natural forest and more like a screen or brise-soleil. Here we see Hockney’s intention to paint ‘internal landscapes’, or dreamlike compositions, that cause the viewer’s eye to ‘wander’. While many of his earlier prints are concerned with representing landscapes as they appear to the eye here he engages with the mind’s eye, asking the viewer to read into the scene and to consider more than one perspective.