A gifted, technically astute, and prolific printmaker, David Hockney has found joy in discovering and exploring the full potential of printmaking mediums throughout his career. An early adopter of technologies, Hockney has embraced digital innovation while working closely with master printers such as Maurice Payne, Aldo Crommelynck and Kenneth Tyler, to learn enormous amounts about the craft of traditional printmaking. He employs the skills and techniques he both learned and invented, to strive constantly for new effects and modes of expression with his favorite pictorial subjects. “I love new mediums,” Hockney states. “I think mediums can turn you on, they can excite you; they always let you do something in a different way. Even if you take the same subject, if you draw it in a different way, or if you are forced to simplify it—to make it bold because it is too finicky—I like that."

Flowers have been a central theme of David Hockney’s work since the 1970s. Sometimes a small vase would appear as fresh, decorative punctuation to an interior scene, as with Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy, 1970-71. Other times a humble arrangement of blooms would become the sole focus of his composition, advancing from the ornamental to the central subject, and exemplifying Hockney’s eye for veracity in seemingly mundane subjects.

Coloured Flowers made of Paper and Ink, 1971, is a lithograph printed from ten plates. Although the buoyantly arranged flowers are at the centre of the composition, they are not necessarily the primary focus. This is a work more concerned with the subject of how it was made than what it depicts. It reveals Hockney’s desire to tell the visual truth by exposing the processes involved, both with the descriptive title, and with the array of pencils (his tools of the trade) in the foreground. The ten printed layers are indicated by the ten individually coloured pencils in the foreground didactically referring to the colour separations involved with the printing. The dense cross-hatching of the background mimics the more precise lines found in Hockney’s etched works and was perhaps used to contrast more starkly with the fluidity of the crayon-like handling of the vase and flowers itself. Different printmaking techniques demand different skills of draughtsmanship: precision and perfection of detail for etching, versus fluidity and spontaneity of line for lithography. Coloured Flowers made of Paper and Ink is almost a hybrid of the two as Hockney worked through which techniques and methods best satisfied his quest.