Celebrated painter David Hockney has revealed that he chose not to paint King Charles when the king visited his London residence on Monday, simply because he doesn’t know him well enough.
This is not Hockney’s first time avoiding portraits of royalty. Back in the day, he turned down multiple invitations to paint the late Queen Elizabeth II, preferring only to paint people he has a personal connection with.
During an interview with The Times ahead of his latest art exhibition, Hockney shared that the king’s visit to his home in Marylebone lasted about an hour but he made no offer to paint the monarch. Hockney also expressed his struggle with portraying the late queen’s majesty, feeling he couldn’t capture her essence accurately.
From Bradford, Hockney emphasized he creates better portraits when he has a strong understanding of the subject. He critically mentioned Lucian Freud’s portrayal of the queen, stating that Freud missed capturing her beautiful skin in his work.
Hockney mentioned that his return to London from his previous home in Normandy was due to privacy concerns, since he found people constantly visiting his place.
His upcoming exhibition, David Hockney 25, is set to open at the Fondation Louis Vuitton art museum in Paris. Among the works to be featured is a piece titled Play Within a Play Within a Play and Me with a Cigarette, which Hockney describes as an anti-smoking statement despite being a smoker himself.
In the same interview, Hockney commented on the rise of authoritarian attitudes in society, likening them to the actions of dictators like Hitler. He also shared his thoughts on the relationship between smoking and lung cancer, suggesting that smoking might not be the sole cause.
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David Hockney, whose career as an artist kicked off in the early 1950s, is famed for his works such as A Bigger Splash (1967), Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures) (1972), and Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1971).
While Hockney never painted the late Queen, he did create a stained glass window dedicated to her, known as The Queen’s Window, which was unveiled at Westminster Abbey back in 2018.
