Portrait of a Stranger

Not long after a friend tells me about David Hockney’s newest project, a portrait series, I spot the artist at a museum event. I’d interviewed Hockney several times over the years and, curious about the portraits, I walk over to find out more. He looks at me intensely for a moment and then asks if I’d like to sit for him.

So it is that I head into the Hollywood Hills, this time at Hockney’s request. Approaching the street, I think, as always, of how easily his colorful, sprawling house and studio could be dropped into one of his paintings. With its rush of bright blues, reds, yellows and other colors, the hidden-away house reflects a palette well known to everyone from sophisticated museum and opera-goers to shoppers stocking up on Christmas cards.

I had visited before, talking with Hockney for various articles and now and again participating unexpectedly in an exercise or test involving some new idea or piece of equipment. Once I was waiting in the living room to interview him when he simply needed another body for a photograph; another time I happened to arrive right after he had purchased some sophisticated new drawing equipment.

Hockney, 63, likes to experiment, whether it’s with state-of-the-art printing devices or centuries-old painting techniques. Much as his viewing of a Vermeer show at the Hague a few years ago led to his vibrant flower paintings, last year’s Ingres exhibition at London’s National Gallery had inspired this latest portrait series.

Hockney went to the exhibition three times and was greatly taken with the “photographic” quality of the 19th century drawings, executed long before the camera became commonplace. He read extensively and studied the drawings for hints of technique. Convinced that Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres had used something optical to achieve that degree of accuracy, Hockney soon bought himself a camera lucida, a small device that works like a prism. He would apply Ingres’ methods--as Hockney imagined them--to his own drawings of people he knew in Los Angeles and London.

By the time I enter Hockney’s huge, open studio for my sitting, its walls are covered with dozens of portraits. Just inside the bright blue studio door are pencil drawings of perhaps 40 people; all are in black and white with just an occasional bit of color--a woman’s orange scarf, a gentleman’s cravat, a fake flower on a child’s hat.

The artist stands near a similar display of close-ups of the same people: friends, colleagues, museum curators, dealers, children. The filmmaker John Schlesinger had sat for Hockney the day before, so his portrait is at the end of each wall’s gallery of faces.

I am familiar with most of these faces; Hockney prefers to draw people he knows. It’s probably a good policy, given both his propensity for experimentation and the childlike curiosity that prompts it. After all, the resulting image might not be particularly flattering or true to a subject’s self-image.

The sitting itself is quite formal. After brief pleasantries, I sit in a black secretarial chair in front of Hockney’s drawing table. He sits across the table from me, perhaps three feet away. His longtime assistant, Richard Schmidt, pulls the cords of two floor-to-ceiling blue curtains to adjust the light. It is time to begin.

On the drawing table are a large piece of drawing paper, several dark pencils, a white chalk pencil, a gum eraser and a pack of Camels. Suspended perhaps a foot above the table is the camera lucida, patented in 1807 and something Hockney calls “essentially a prism on a stick.”

Hockney leans forward to peer into the small prism that, he says, gives the illusion of my image on paper, helping him set my eyes, nose and mouth accurately before he draws directly from his own observation. “Making these measurements gives me a fast forward,” he says later. “That’s all. That’s what Ingres did, I’m positive.”

Then and later, he stares at me so intently that I mostly look at the top of his head or above it. When he looks down, I peer at his face as he has at mine, absorbing it, taking it apart, putting it back together--the blue eyes, the faint brows, the blond-gray hair, the day’s light beard on his chin, the granny glasses.

As he works, he contorts his face. Sometimes he squints one eye, sometimes both. He purses his lips, often sticks out his tongue. I see the young Hockney of his self-portraits and photographs and, on and off, a preview of the old Hockney.

He doesn’t talk when he draws, and if people speak, he doesn’t hear them. “When I draw a portrait and look into a face, I concentrate heavily,” he told me once. “I can’t bear any background noise.”

Hockney’s unrelenting study makes it difficult for me to hold a thought, although I do wonder what he sees in my face and what he looks for in any face. He may be thinking about me, the Hubble Space Telescope (a favorite subject) or even his forthcoming lunch. But given the single-mindedness with which he approaches his craft, it is more likely that his attention is entirely on his work.

He wears an old sweater, pale green with long sleeves. Every so often, I glimpse a shoulder blade at the neck edge of the sweater or, more often, the blue band of his wristwatch. He never looks at the watch; he seems to work from an internal clock.

After facing straight ahead for what seems a very long while, I look just past his right shoulder and up at the clock to find that only 20 minutes have passed. My back and shoulders ache a little and my head and arms feel strange from having been so still. He had said we would need at least two hours, so I know I’ll need to pace myself. My body will have to adjust, I decide, and I satisfy myself with tiny moves of my feet and my hands, all out of sight and irrelevant to the sitting.

The only sound is his pencil on paper. Sometimes it moves rapidly, and I assume he is drawing my hair. He tells me later that hair is difficult and that he bought wigs to practice drawing hair.

One hour in, I’m allowed to take a break. I do a neck stretch, take some water. He stretches, sighs, looks weary. “It’s very intense, this,” he says.

We resume, and he announces that he’s got the general lines of my face on the paper. I can relax a little. We talk about a play we both saw a few weeks ago, an art exhibit we attended. But conversation remains very spare.

After two hours, we both stand up and move about the studio. I find pen and paper to write down these thoughts, and we sit back down in our chairs. I am tiring and my shoulders sag. Then I see that he is drawing some of my upper body as well. “I was slumping,” I say, sitting up straight. He looks perturbed. “Does that alter things?” I ask, apologetic. “A little.” He erases a line or two, then sweeps the leavings off with a thick white brush.

When we are done, he shows me the portrait. He says my face may seem elongated because I sat a little closer to him than others had. But he looks at the portrait contentedly, and I sense that he is pleased. He doesn’t seem to want a reaction from me. “I never ask the sitters what they think,” he says, perhaps by way of warning. “Their friends tell me,” he adds.

I am relieved that he doesn’t want to know, as I honestly don’t know what I would say. The face staring back at me is very different from the one I see in the mirror. It is a sad face, very sad, and very serious. It looks a little like the drawings of Virginia Woolf I’ve seen on book jackets and Barnes & Noble bags. And, I guess, it looks a little like me. It isn’t an unattractive face, just an unfamiliar one.

I do wonder about the sadness, an emotion that permeated his last portrait of me as well, since I don’t think of myself as sad. “When you’re drawing someone else,” Hockney once told me, “it’s their mood and your mood together that creates whatever’s there.” Maybe I bring out his sadness.

Several weeks later, I call his office to acquire a photograph of the drawing only to learn that the portrait will be among 42 in an exhibition at the UCLA Hammer Museum. The artist’s growing curiosity about Ingres’ techniques has led not just to studio experiments, but also to assorted lectures, articles, a forthcoming book about his findings and the first public showing of the camera lucida work.

This, I admit, is more than I’d bargained for. The way Hockney saw me one day last August would now be the way museum-goers saw me as well. A private moment was going public.

As I stood in the rounded museum gallery a few days later, I had trouble looking at myself refracted and reconstructed under his gaze. He had colored in the blue of my sweater and added more of my upper body. The John Schlesinger portrait was on the museum wall and so were portraits of photographer Herb Ritts, Getty Museum director John Walsh, artists R. B. Kitaj, Francesco Clemente and Don Bachardy, and other people surely more accustomed to such things.

Maybe I assumed that the drawing of me was destined for oblivion, even though the Ingres drawings that inspired Hockney are still in museums nearly 200 years after they were done. I still don’t know how I feel about this other, sadder me, much less about so many strangers pondering my face. But I sense that this adventure, begun nearly a year ago, has yet to run its course.