Cigarette in one hand, paintbrush in the other: David Hockney’s latest self-portrait is as original as ever. He wears a suit of three-colour tweed, what’s more, just to complicate the depiction of the material world. The picture hangs at the door of Hockney’s Eye at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and it is the wittiest of welcomes. For only one eye is clearly visible behind a pair of jaunty yellow specs.
Hockney will be 85 in July and this feels like an early celebration, a party to which all ages are welcome. Its theme – and Hockney’s enduring obsession – is the great conundrum of how to represent the three-dimensional world in two dimensions. It runs all the way from shadows and silhouettes to vanishing points, linear perspective and the infinite calculus of dots, dabs, lines, colours, tones and hues that make up an image. And that is before his theories about optical devices.
