“In no other medium that Hockney has employed have style and experimentation, tradition and the unfamiliar, reinforced one another and developed alongside each other as they have in drawing.” 1

Drawing has been a vital component of Hockney’s artistic output since he began his art training at the Bradford School of Art. At the Royal College of Art in London it continued to inform his practice and throughout a career which has been characterized by stylistic diversity and experimentation, drawing has remained the medium to which the artist has returned, time and time again.

After Hockney moved to Los Angeles in 1964 drawing became united with a new-found naturalism in his work. The exciting experience of a new city and landscape provided Hockney with a hugely stimulating range of subjects to explore and drawing thus became a way of not only exploring formal ideas, but as a means of documenting daily experiences and preserving certain memories of people, time and place. The accessible nature of this medium also meant that it was something that Hockney- who has travelled prolifically throughout his career- could engage with on a daily basis. Indeed, during the early 1970s Hockney spend part of every month abroad, so much so, that the artist was forced to acknowledge,

“I know some people think one leads a glamorous life, but I must admit, I’ve never felt that myself. Even when you’re sat here in Hollywood with a swimming pool out there, I still feel my life is just as a working artist, actually. That’s the way I see it.’’ 2

This desire and ability to constantly engage with drawing meant that from 1970 onwards it was a central focus in the artist’s work, becoming critically recognized as an important aspect of the artist’s work. In 1971 Hockney’s drawings from the sixties formed the central focus of the Bielefeld Kunsthalle’s exhibition and, three years later, a second retrospective in Paris presented more than double the number of drawings than paintings. In the latter part of the 1970s several more exhibitions provided major surveys of Hockney’s drawings and today, they are held in equal esteem to his paintings.

Six Trees in a Driveway, Los Angeles, 1976

"Is it possible to do anything new in the landscape genre? Most of the art world thinks it's not worth doing anymore... It is the position I now find myself in, realizing that two hundred years ago Constable would have thought the optical projection of nature was something to aim for. I now know it is not. So stand in the landscape you love, try and depict your feelings of space, and forget photographic vision, which is distancing us too much from the physical world." 3

Six Trees in a Driveway, Los Angeles, 1976 is one of several L.A street scenes drawn by Hockney during a trip to California in January of that year (see also Fig.1). Collectively, these drawings present a stylized and undeniably pretty view of an otherwise relatively mundane and urbane subject and, in doing so, reveal the delight the artist took in the everyday landscape of Los Angeles. Indeed, in the present drawing, colour is vibrant and heightened, creating a joyful image of a subject and place that was, and still is, so treasured the artist.

In this drawing emphasis is placed on the trees and garden which constitute the middle ground of the composition. Although Hockney produced his first landscape in 1961, it was only after his arrival in Los Angeles that he became actively interested in gardens as a subject. The motif of the tree provided an interesting vehicle through which to discuss the element of artifice inherent in all artistic representation, whether it is ‘naturalistic’ or not. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the first tree Hockney chose to immortalize in paint in California was a plastic one which had been planted outside of the City Hall (see Fig.2).

In Six Trees in a Driveway, Los Angeles, 1976 we are presented with the record of a landscape drawn from life. Yet, Hockney plays with this assumption subtly by manipulating formal qualities such as colour and form in order to create an image that lies somewhere between the borders of abstraction and naturalism. The formalized nature of the image; trees which appear almost smooth in surface and are defined by thick stripes of varying greens, a lawn configured in smaller stripes of red and green and a car whose form is reduced to sketchy pink lines, hint at the more complex questions of representation which are at play. In this drawing Hockney utilizes and distills a broad range of formal devices, typical of his approach to image making, which encourages an embrace of all artistic styles and a freedom in the artist’s approach to representation. As Hockney stated in the same year that he produced this work,

”Tomorrow if I want, I could get up, I could do a drawing of someone, I could draw my mother from memory, I could even paint a strange little abstract picture…A lot of painters can't do that - their concept is completely different. It's too narrow; they make it much too narrow. A lot of them, like Frank Stella, who told me so, he can't draw at all. To me, a lot of painters were trapping themselves; they were picking such a narrow aspect of painting and specializing in it. And it's a trap.” 4

1. Ulrich Luckhardt, ‘Introduction,’ David Hockney, A Drawing Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, London, 1996, p.13
2. Ibid, p114
3. The artist quoted in The East Yorkshire Landscape, exh. cat, LA Louver, 2007, n.p
4. David Hockney, David Hockney, My Early Years, ed Nikos Stangos, Thames and Hudson, 1976, p97