David Hockney is not just a painter or draughtsman, he is one of the most versatile and technically adventurous printmakers of the 20th and 21st centuries. Across a career spanning over six decades, Hockney has explored and often redefined multiple printmaking techniques: etching, lithography, aquatint, screen printing, fax, photocopier, and most recently, inkjet printing and digital tablets. His earliest etchings at the Royal College of Art (Myself and My Heroes, A Rake's Progress) showed how radically he could combine text, line, and ideas. In the 1970s, his lithographs with Gemini G.E.L. (like Portrait of Célia) introduced a vibrant, painterly freedom into the medium. Later, works like The Blue Guitar series and Moving Focus lithographs pushed spatial experimentation and Cubist influence further, proving that printmaking could carry the same intellectual weight as painting.
Hockney has always been quick to adapt new tools. His Home Made Prints of the 1980s were made using colour photocopiers, layer by layer, in a uniquely analogue-digital hybrid. In the 2000s and beyond, he embraced inkjet printers, drawing with a stylus on graphics tablets to produce vibrant editions like The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate or The Yosemite Suite - a leap into the age of digital mark making. What unites all of these approaches is Hockney's draughtsmanship and curiosity. He uses print not simply for reproduction, but as a distinct mode of thinking and seeing. Whether in line or colour, in
intaglio or inkjet, Hockney's prints remain among the most experimental, collectible, and revealing aspects of his entire practice.