I first fell under the spell of David Hockney’s prints as a student of printmaking and life drawing. Australia had been my home for only a few years and I found a key to my experience of movement and growth in the series A Rake’s Progress (1961–63), completed after Hockney’s first journey from London to New York and back.
There was something about images such as The Arrival – with its promise of a new world, etched in floral plumes of red ink and spidery black lines dancing on the edge of incoherence – that felt so familiar.
