Hockney begins writing an art historical book detailing his research—via the visual rather than the written record—into the use of optical devices by the Old Masters. The project demonstrates his longtime fascination with the interplay of painting and photography in picture-making. With the input of art historians and scientists, he performs experiments to reconstruct how, in many masterpieces, the depiction of space was achieved through the projection onto a surface of a subject’s image via lens, which artists then traced and otherwise manipulated. In his Los Angeles studio, he creates The Great Wall of images charting five centuries of artistic development in the West, from the “pre-optics” of Byzantine mosaics (c. 1150) to an 1889 Post-Impressionist portrait by Vincent van Gogh. 

Using high-quality color photocopies, Hockney arranges the portraits chronologically on a horizontal axis (early to late, left to right) and geographically on a vertical axis (transitioning from Northern European works at the top to those from Southern Europe at the bottom). With The Great Wall assembled, he is able to pinpoint the moment in time, circa 1430, when artists began using optical devices, first apparently in Bruges with Jan van Eyck’s Portrait of Giovanni(?) Arnolfini and His Wife. Hockney realizes that portraiture from [NESTED]that moment going forward took on a photographic quality until the advent of printed photography around 1825 when painters began to loosen up.

Hockney grows increasingly proficient at using the camera lucida, and a show of these intricate drawings opens in late April at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, [NESTED]Likeness: Recent Portrait Drawings by David Hockney.

For the exhibition, Encounters: New Art from Old, the National Gallery in London asks 24 artists of international renown to create original artworks reflecting the museum’s permanent collection. Hockney, who has been deeply invested in Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingre’s small, delicately observed drawings of people since thrice visiting an exhibition of the neoclassical painter’s work at the Royal Academy the previous year, contributes drawings of the National Gallery’s security guards made with the assistance of his camera lucida: 12 Portraits after Ingres in a Uniform Style. With the guards themselves often near to the work within the gallery, visitors are able to assess the likenesses achieved firsthand.

Staying in London through the summer, Hockney paints portraits, scenes from East Yorkshire, his studio garden, and recollected images of his Los [NESTED] Angeles garden and the Californian scenery. By September he returns to L.A. where he continues the theme of painting his surroundings, including the garden at his home and studio.