David Hockney is a leading figure in contemporary printmaking. Since 1954 making prints has been an integral part of Hockney's art practice. It is a field of art in which he is truly gifted and, over five decades, he has created a significant body of prints. He has constantly pushed the boundaries of printmaking in terms of style, subject matter and technique. This is almost without parallel in recent art history. Printmaking has also provided Hockney with a diversion when other forms of his art, notably painting, were in a stylistic and iconographic cul de sac. The history of Hockney's involvement in making prints has formed a critical path in his overall artistic development in all its variety of forms. For much of his life as an artist, David Hockney has been freer, more experimental and less inhibited in his approach to creating art, when making prints than when painting. A successful career in painting often eluded him during much of his early career particularly after he adopted the use of acrylic paint and Hockney would often find himself in an artistic dead end in his painting style. In contrast, making prints often provided a way forward for Hockney. This modus operandi continued for much of his artistic life until his more recent embrace of digital processes in art using an iPhone or iPad. Hockney's development from an emerging artist to a mature and successful one lay in his constant searching for new ways of depiction, other than those belonging to new modernist canons. He was constantly posing pictorial problems and then trying to solve them. To this end, Hockney developed a hybrid art in his printmaking, one of wide ranging eclecticism. He then turned to naturalism, only to find he needed to explore further choices. As a mature artist Hockney achieved a fusion of the abstract and formal elements in his work and to tackle age-old issues - how to portray someone, how to depict a landscape and a season, a time of day and under certain weather conditions and how to indicate space and time in two-dimensional art form. For Hockney, printmaking has been an integral part of this search and discovery. Now entering the second decade of the 21st century, Hockney has finally achieved his ambition to become a landscape painter of consequence and now the focus for Hockney lies there. The significant purpose and role that prints played in his artistic career in the twentieth century have ceased to exist - at least for the present. -- provided by Candidate
