House Doodle

This signed etching on paper, entitled House Doodle, is by British artist David Hockney. It was produced in 1984 – the same year in which Hockney painted the vast canvas A Visit With Christopher And Don, Santa Monica Canyon, a work he once called “the most complicated painting I’ve ever done”. Complication is a theme which also permeates House Doodle, which was released in an edition of 60. Art historian Marco Livingstone, a close friend of Hockney, once described the etching as a visual exploration of the ‘stream-of-consciousness wanderings of the mind’. Like many other of Hockney’s works, it owes visible debt to the work of Spanish painter, Pablo Picasso; in the centre of the etching, a distorted face looks out to us, recalling Picasso’s famed portraits of the French surrealist, Dora Maar. Subjects which frequently recur within Hockney’s wider œuvre also feature in the work, including the swimming pool and the distorted chair, depicted from a multitude of clashing perspectives. Uniting many different motifs and influences within one work - which, strikingly, appears to have no central focal point - Hockney provides a cartographic rendering of his artistic practice and the many sources of inspiration it harnesses. Much like the prints Auden (1970) or Maurice Payne (1971), there is an ethereal quality to this piece which Hockney creates by being economical in his approach towards likeness.