{"id":133692,"date":"2020-02-25T14:54:10","date_gmt":"2020-02-25T13:54:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/2020\/02\/25\/david-hockney-drawing-from-life-review-stripping-subjects-down-to-their-gym-socks\/"},"modified":"2020-02-25T14:54:10","modified_gmt":"2020-02-25T13:54:10","slug":"david-hockney-drawing-from-life-review-stripping-subjects-down-to-their-gym-socks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/?p=133692","title":{"rendered":"David Hockney: Drawing from Life review \u2013 stripping subjects down to their gym socks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>National Portrait Gallery, London From joyful sketches of old friends to a nude meeting with Picasso \u2013 when Hockney wields his pencil we see the undisguised truthWhen it comes to wielding a pencil, an etching burin or just a felt pen, David Hockney has no rivals. Lucian Freud\u2019s etchings bore me senseless, Francis Bacon barely doodled, but Hockney is a graphic master. His retrospective of a life of portrait drawing is the most dazzling display of his art I have ever seen.Forget the rants about smoking, or the personality that has always made him so lovable. Hockney here is not a star but a stare. In self-portraits drawn with a steady black line, he eyeballs himself in the mirror, mercilessly seeing lank hair and a skinny body. He draws his own eyes through the unforgiving lenses of his spectacles. It\u2019s uncomfortable to stand close to those eyes \u2013 the sense of Hockney sizing you up is almost oppressive. This series was made in 1983, when he was still blond, but he can see himself getting older. What does the future hold? The intensity of Hockney\u2019s self-inspection, fag in mouth, bears comparison with Rembrandt. When an artist looks so hard into the mirror, we share what they see \u2013 we are invited into the undisguised truth. Continue reading&#8230;<br \/>\nVia: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/artanddesign\/2020\/feb\/25\/david-hockney-drawing-from-life-review-national-portrait-gallery-london\" target=\"_blank\">David Hockney: Drawing from Life review \u2013 stripping subjects down to their gym socks<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>National Portrait Gallery, London From joyful sketches of old friends to a nude meeting with Picasso \u2013 when Hockney wields his pencil we see the undisguised truthWhen it comes to wielding a pencil, an etching burin or just a felt pen, David Hockney has no rivals. Lucian Freud\u2019s etchings bore [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-133692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=133692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133692\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=133692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=133692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=133692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}