In A Chiaroscuro
Signed Print

In 1976 Hockney visited Fire Island with his friends Henry Geldzahler and writer Christopher Isherwood. It was here that he came across Wallace Stevens’s 1936 poem The Man with the Blue Guitar which had been inspired by a 1903 painting by Picasso entitled The Old Guitarist. Hockney decided to base a series of works on the poems and described how 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’. Here we see that juxtaposition between reality and imagination illustrated to full effect in this enigmatic interior scene that plays with our perception of space and appears almost theatrical in its composition. While discordant shapes and objects interact however, the colours of the work softly complement each other, showing Hockney’s mastery of the sugar lift aquatint technique he learned in the early ’70s.