Drawing from Life

Celebrating more than 60 years of intimate portraiture by David Hockney.

Published to accompany a major international exhibition, David Hockney: Drawing from Life features Hockney’s drawings from the 1950s to the present day, and focuses on his depictions of himself and a small group of sitters close to him: his muse, Celia Birtwell; his mother, Laura Hockney; and his friends, the curator, Gregory Evans, and master printer, Maurice Payne. In his portrait drawings of these figures, Hockney tries out new stylistic experiments and expresses his admiration for his artistic predecessors, from Holbein to Picasso.

Featuring 150 beautifully reproduced works from public and private collections across the world, this publication traces the trajectory of Hockney’s drawing practice by examining how he has revisited these five figures throughout his career. Highlights include a series of new portraits, colored pencil drawings created in Paris in the early 1970s, composite Polaroid portraits from the 1980s and a selection of drawings from an intense period of self-scrutiny during the 1980s when the artist created a self-portrait every day for two months.