Product Review

David Hockney: Double Portrait celebrates the artist's return to London from Los Angeles in 2002 when he re-engages with a subject that 30 years before had inspired some of his most iconic images, like 'Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy'. Hockney was now using watercolour for the first time, painting 40 large double portraits over a four-month period, each done from life in a day. He calls them "Portraits for the 21st Century". Filmed behind-the-scenes in Hockney's home and studio as he prepares for two exhibitions of the work, and using interviews with his family and his oldest or closest friends who came to sit for him, the BBC documentary explores the personal and private nature of Hockney's portraiture and creates an intimate psychological portrait of the artist as he paints the relationships in his own life. Double Portrait won Best Film at Roma DOCFEST in 2005 and was nominated by FIPA for Best Creative Documentary in 2004. Reviews: "A beautifully considered study of the artist's year in London painting watercolour portraits of couples. Both accessible and intelligent, you came away from watching it enriched. Simply a triumph." (Broadcast) "This brilliant documentary shows us that Hockney is still in deadly earnest and yet wants to provoke at the same time." (The Observer) "What emerges from the film is that these portraits aren't about the sitters, but about Hockney. Just as his work of the 60's and 70's defined those decades, this is Hockney's take on the beginning of the twenty-first century: bleak, isolationist, unadorned and slightly edgy." (Time Out)