David Hockney Coloured Flowers Made of Paper and Ink (M.C.A.T. 113) For Sale

This print is Hockney’s elegant take on the canonical art history subject: the flower still life. Created in 1971, Hockney depicts a series of flowers within a slender glass vase, ranging from daisies to cornflowers, to poppies in an explosion of red, blue, yellow and white out of each green stem. Each flower spills out of the vase, leaning towards the table. This illusion of weight adds a sense of realism to the otherwise graphic style. The simple addition of sporadic blue and green lines within the vase add texture to the glass vase, presenting the distorted view of stems through the thick glass. Hockney masterfully manipulates perspective within this lithograph, adding a shadow to the left of the vase to suggest light and depth. Behind the flowers is a crosshatched background, the geometric harshness of which contrasts with the soft and gentle colouring of the flowerheads. Below the flowers is a variety of pencil pointing up towards the centrepiece, guiding the viewer’s eyes towards it. The pencils add a rather tongue-in-cheek, metaphysical acknowledgement of its own creation, alluding to the presence of Hockney himself. This alludes to the title of the piece, we begin to question that perhaps these are not real flowers after all, but a creation of the artist made of ‘paper and ink’.

The subject of flowers in one that Hockney returns to constantly throughout his career, emphasising the artists’ acknowledgement and understanding of the history of art. Hockney repeats this print again in black and white, in Flowers Made of Paper and Black Ink. Flowers have always been the canon of the still life genre, featuring repeatedly throughout the history of art, from Dutch 17^th century master’s to the pre-Raphaelites, to Andy Warhol. David Hockney has contributed a new and dynamic approach to the depiction of flowers. Moving away from his pop art contemporary Andy Warhol’s flat and unnatural flowers, Hockney maintains the elegance and simple beauty of each plant through the lithograph style, offering a new take on a historical subject.