David Hockney, The Scrabble Game (1983)
Hockney describes the piece in That’s The Way I See It:
The Scrabble Game was done when my mother was visiting at Christmas. Ann Upton, David Graves and my mother played. I joined in too, though I couldn’t concentrate much on the game because I was taking pictures. It was while I was doing this piece that I saw that I was using narrative for the first time, using a new dimension of time.
More description from the book, David Hockney: The Biography, 1975-2012:
In the foreground, Hockney’s own hands hover over his stand of seven letters that read, from left to right, LQUIREU. Seated to his right, his mother looks pensive, her five-times-repeated face giving little away as she rests her chin on her hands or scratches her nose, her right hand eventually poised over the word ‘VEX’, which, encompassing a double word square, would net her a score of twenty-six points. She gives off every indication of being an expert. Ann, on the other hand, seated to her right, looks anything but, obviously struggling to find a word and finally grinning with pleasure at managing ‘NET’, giving her a pathetic score of three. next to her, David Graves, keeping the score, just laughs, while in the far left-hand margin of the picture a bored cat cleans its face.
You can zoom in over at the Christie’s website
Filed under: David Hockney
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