A Picture Of Ourselves
Signed Print

Clouds of blue ink float across the sky. Below, a large window or mirror reflects a strange figure with trunk-like protrusions and large nostrils, a far cry from the classical statue of a woman, nude and hiding her face that stands before it. Beside the woman is an arrangement of objects, piled on top of one another to create a discordant sculpture. To the right of the statue a red curtain is pulled back, as if to unveil this scene to the viewer or to suggest this is taking place on a stage. David Hockney’s A Picture Of Ourselves is part of The Blue Guitar portfolio of 1976–77, inspired by the poems of Wallace Stevens and the paintings of Pablo Picasso. Commenting on the images’ relation to Stevens’s poems, Hockney said that the ‘etchings themselves were not conceived as literal illustrations of the poem but as an interpretation of its themes in visual terms. Like the poem, they are about transformations within art as well as the relation between reality and the imagination, so these are pictures and different styles of representation juxtaposed and reflected and dissolved within the same frame’.