Made In April
Signed Print

Featuring lines from Wallace Stevens’s poem ‘The Blue Guitar’, David Hockney’s Made in April is one of the more serene compositions in the portfolio named after the literary work. Rendered in the blue and red ink most associated with this series, the work reproduces the text backwards, as if read in a mirror or on the etching plate. The words are framed by delicate outlines of a guitar and somewhat obscured by blobs of watery ink. Interestingly, the letters of the words alternate in colour as if the artist wished to show off his newfound ability to use the sugar lift aquatint technique that allowed him to bring more colour to his etchings. This is the only work in the series to feature words from the poem, making it a contrast with the strange scenes and surreal compositions that make up the majority of the portfolio, which was, as Hockney put it, never intended to illustrate but to accompany. Remarking on their relation to the poem he said, “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”.