Finding the Magic in the Big Picture

It takes a little time to get used to David Hockney’s new portraits. So whatever your initial response to these seemingly ordinary drawings, look again. Every one of them does a lot more than immediately meets the eye.

At first, Hockney’s page-size pictures of people’s faces appear to be straightforward studies, conventional exercises by which the inventive artist tests his talent to capture--in graphite, crayon and gouache--the various ways disparate details combine to form legible expressions that are utterly individualistic. For the last 500 years or so, this has been portraiture’s primary goal, and the 42 works in “Likeness: Recent Portrait Drawings by David Hockney” at the UCLA Hammer Museum pursue it with quiet tenacity.

Many of the people Hockney portrays appear to be caught up in conundrums, as skeptical about what the artist is up to as they are uncertain about their own roles in the process. Some look suspicious or slightly miffed at themselves for agreeing to sit still for three or four hours while Hockney scrutinizes their faces, stealing whatever he can from their variously guarded countenances.

In “Mark Glazebrook, London, 14th December, 1999,” a well-heeled gentleman raises his chin, squints his eyes and, folding his hands over his stomach, touches the tips of his thumbs together as if he were impervious to anything the portraitist might come up with. Nevertheless, his normally confident bearing is shaken. Used to being in control of a situation, Glazebrook looks as if he’s out of his element here but too proud to give up without a struggle.

In “Don Bachardy, Los Angeles, 28th July, 1999,” the well-known portrait-painter stands stiffly, his striped jacket and dark tie forming a symmetrical composition that matches the nervous seriousness of his demeanor. Staring straight at the viewer, the tight-lipped sitter looks exposed and vulnerable, as if he knows how cruel a portrait can be.

In the first of Maurice Payne’s four images, he appears to be a disembodied object, willing to put his time in but not much more. In the second, he casts his eyes downward, as if studying his shoelaces or making a space for himself apart from the intrusive gaze of the artist. In the third, he looks scattered, hardly able to inhabit the present. And in “Maurice Payne, Los Angeles, 11th September, 1999” he is diffident and apprehensive, too worn down to do anything but wait out the artist’s efforts.

Without exception, Hockney’s sitters all appear to be actively involved in a participatory experiment. Like the people in his pictures, viewers are also active participants in ongoing dramas.

The most fascinating aspect of Hockney’s portraits is how far away they make you stand to see them at their most effective. Depending upon the crispness of your vision (or how recently you’ve had the prescriptions of your lenses updated), these intimately scaled images snap into focus from 6 to 10 feet away. To make this distance seem even greater, Hockney has reduced the scale of most of his sitters’ heads so that they’re no bigger than the palm of your hand. The largest ones are all significantly smaller than life-size.

Unlike most portraits drawn in pencil on paper, which invite viewers to stand a foot or two from their surfaces, Hockney’s push you back so far that it’s all but impossible to savor the shaded subtleties and fraction-of-an-inch decisions that went into their making. Consequently, you examine the faces that take shape on their surfaces in the same way that you look at the people you see on the street: as unified wholes whose salient facial features play off of one another to embody ever-changing attitudes that go hand-in-glove with particular personalities.

Ordinarily, our eyes perceive such characteristics in split-seconds. Our brains interpret them as coherent demeanors or consistent outlooks almost as quickly. Hockney’s portraits give viewers permission to stare at other peoples’ faces without being rude. Unlike photographs, they do not freeze an otherwise imperceptible slice of time in perpetuity as much as they compress, into two dimensions, expressions that combine the weight of habits with the fresh, one-on-one directness of fleeting impressions.

Nearly all of the drawings rivet your attention on the eyes, noses and mouths of the sitters. The rest of their faces are not rendered with the same precision: Hair, whiskers and ears drop off in the fastidiousness of their detail. Even more sketchy are clothes, jewelry and limbs, which are often mere outlines. Furniture is present only by implication, in the way some elbows are braced against the places tabletops should be or are thrown over the backs of implied chairs or sofas. Think of Hockney’s portraits as targets whose bull’s-eyes are aligned with the bridges of sitters’ noses and you’ll have an idea of how their intensity builds around these focal points--but always from a distance.

To step in for a close-up view is to stop seeing the people in the drawings and to start seeing the drawing in the drawings--the individual lines and singular gestures that attest to the activity of their making. When you focus on how Hockney’s drawings were made--part by part, rather than on their unified effect, the seemingly fleshy solidity of the sitters dissolves into insubstantial swirls of scratchy, threadlike marks.

The experience is off-putting. It is as if the Oz-like illusions have vanished and you’re left with the artist’s shop secrets, none of which he tries to hide.

An informative brochure with a thoughtful essay by Marco Livingstone describes how Hockney uses a camera lucida to sketch the contours of his sitters before going to work on the details that distinguish them as individuals. Invented in 1807, the camera lucida is basically a prism on a stick that reflects a sitter’s image on a sheet of paper.

Similar devices may have been used by such artists as Ingres, Caravaggio and Velazquez, a theory Hockney has been actively espousing. But in Hockney’s hands, the simple tool serves as a point of departure for images at once old-fashioned and up-to-date. With one foot firmly planted in the vanishing world of mannered formalities and the other in that of casual glances stolen on the street, these lively pictures pull you in and push you back so that you just have to see for yourself.

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* “Likeness: Recent Portrait Drawings by David Hockney,” UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood, (310) 443-7000, through June 4. Closed Mondays. Adults: $4.50