The present drawing was made on Fire Island, New York state, sometime between mid-August and early September 1976 when David Hockney, Henry Geldzhaler and Gregory Evans were staying for a second consecutive summer at the Pines holiday home of Manhattan banker Arthur Lambert.

Fire Island, which is located 5 miles off the South shore of Long Island had a legendary party scene at the time and Hockney and his close friends were there, like everyone else, for ‘the tea dances, the drugs and the discos’. 1 Hockney of course never stopped working wherever he went, shooting countless rolls of film of boys on the beach, and drawing his friends, who were, as ever, on hand to sit for him.

The subject here is Tim Macdonald the brother of model Joe Macdonald, a close friend of Hockney who was renting a house on the island. Tim had joined Joe for a holiday in between moving from San Francisco to New York and recalls going round to take tea with Hockney on several afternoons and sitting for drawings. 2 In addition to this beautiful line drawing, these sittings produced at least one further work - a fully realised, coloured pencil study, which Tim subsequently acquired from the legendary dealer André Emmerich. After moving to New York that year, Tim enjoyed a successful career as an interior designer, working for Angelo Donghia before starting his own design firm.

The sketchier figure in the background, watching a super-8 movie and smoking a cigarette, is almost certainly Larry Stanton, Lambert’s younger boyfriend. Stanton, then aged 29, was an aspiring artist who painted portraits. He shared Hockney’s love of photography and was in the habit of filming everything and everyone on the island. Stanton makes a brief appearance in Jack Hazan’s 1974 film A Bigger Splash, sitting silently with Hockney on a couch (Fig.1). He sadly died of AIDS in 1984 aged just 37, but over the past few years his arresting, stylised portraits of young men have come to the attention of the art world again. 3

Hockney was always naturally talented at drawing, but he consciously returned to drawing from life in the mid-1960s and focused on it even more closely from 1968, when he was working on his series of highly realistic double portraits, such as Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy and American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman), which were based on both drawings and colour photographs. By the early 1970s, Hockney was making wonderfully detailed drawings, both in ink and in coloured pencil. Drawing in ink represented the ultimate challenge, as there was only one chance to get it right, as Hockney described, 'I never talk when I am drawing a person, especially if I'm making line drawings. I prefer there to be no noise at all so I can concentrate more. You can't make a line too slowly, you have to go at a certain speed; so the concentration needed is quite strong. It's very tiring as well. If you make two or three line drawings, it's very tiring in the head, because you have to do it all at one go, something you've no need to do with pencil drawings…Its exciting doing it, and I think it's harder than anything else; so when they succeed, they're much better drawings, often.' 4

Here Hockney clearly delights in capturing the details of Tim’s curly hair, which along with his eyes, is the central focus of the drawing. Hockney also took great delight in detailing the curly hair of his boyfriend at the time Gregory Evans (still a close friend and manager of the artist’s studio) in drawings like Gregory in Golf Cap, 1976 (Fig.2). Always a snappy dresser himself, another of Hockney’s favourite things to draw was interesting clothes, see for example the drawings Mark Glazebrook, 1970, where Hockney goes to town drawing every detail of the sitter’s plaid jacket, and Mo, Paris, 1973 (Fig.3), where the focus is on McDermott’s Celia Birtwell designed, floral shirt. Here, Macdonald’s Hawaiian shirt echoes Hockney’s paintings which play with a medley of styles – offering an image within an image, a graphic representation of pineapples, within a more naturalistic scene. While the figure of Stanton, an ‘artist at work’, in the background anticipates Hockney’s 1977 painting Model with Unfinished Self Portrait (Fig.4), with the projector screen here rather like an upright canvas.

Earlier in 1976, Hockney had worked on a series of lithographs, made by drawing directly onto stone. These were effectively a series of academic portrait drawings, including one of Joe Macdonald, which were published as the suite Friends. It was during this second trip to Fire Island that Hockney first read the poem The Man with the Blue Guitar by Wallace Stevens. He made his first ten drawings inspired by the poem while still at Lambert’s house, and then developed these into a series of 20 prints subtitled ‘Etchings by David Hockney Who Was inspired by Wallace Stevens Who Was Inspired by Pablo Picasso’. Just a few weeks after this trip, in October 1976, Hockney’s ‘autobiography‘ was published. The book, ghost written by Nikos Stangos, based on 25 hours of tape recorded interviews with the artist, was a huge success. It had to be reprinted several times over and sold over 20,000 copies.

Hockney had begun the decade with a retrospective at the Whitechapel art gallery in 1970. At the end of the 1970s seventy-five of his exquisite drawings were brought together with seventy-four of his prints for Travels with Pen, Pencils and Ink - a major survey exhibition which between 1977 and 1980 toured to the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington and Tate Gallery, London.

1 Christopher Sykes, David Hockney: A Biography Volume 2 1975-2012, A Pilgrim’s Progress, Century, London, 2014, p36
2 Interview between Tim Macdonald and Offer Waterman, April 2023
3 A new monograph of Stanton's life and work was published by Apartmento magazine in 2022 edited by Fabio Cherstich and Arthur Lambert titled 'Think of me When it Thunders'.
4 Nikos Stangos, David Hockney by David Hockney, My Early Years, Thames and Hudson, London, 1976, p158