Warm Start
Signed Print

Featuring brightly coloured wave like or biomorphic shapes against a grey ground, this work is part of David Hockney's Some New Prints series which sees him exploring abstraction and multiple perspectives in order to create imagined landscapes. Through the washes of ink, the gestural marks, we can perhaps discern some rolling Californian hills, the shadows of cypress trees as well as wild desert flowers reaching up into the sky. Playing with our sense of perspective as well as our need to ‘read’ an image, even when it appears to be abstract, here Hockney invokes the fragmented vision of Cubism and his earlier photographic collages to present us with a landscape that has been cut up and rearranged in order for our eye ‘to wander’ about within it. Made in collaboration with the Gemini print workshop in LA Some New Prints was published in 1993 just a year after the Some New Paintings series which follows similar themes and styles, first explored in Hockney’s set designs for a production of Richard Strauss’s opera Die Frau Ohne Schatten, or the woman without a shadow, in 1992, just one of many of hockney’s forays into the world of the stage.