David Hockney – Drawing from Life review: He’s as magnetic with a pen, pencil or paintbrush

David Hockney is justifiably proud of his drawing skills. open image in gallery 'Celia, Carennac, August 1971’ The sight of Hockney’s coloured pencil drawings of the coolly beautiful Birtwell sent me tumbling straight down a time tunnel to the early Seventies, when every art student and illustrator in the country seemed to be imitating the highly seductive style employed in these works. open image in gallery ‘Self Portrait 26th Sept. 1983' The images of Hockney’s sometime lover, assistant and curator Gregory Evans take in an amazing diversity of mediums from rapid pen-and-ink studies to near-photographic crayon drawings and a very large quasi-Cubist lithograph, though Evans’s wide-eyed, abstracted expression barely changes over the decades. The portraits of master printer Maurice Payne, who has printed much of Hockney’s graphic work since the early Sixties, follow a similar pattern of styles and mediums, though these feel the least personal and thus the least affecting works in the show. open image in gallery 'Harry Styles, May 31st’, 2022 The show ends with the so-called Normandy Portraits: 30 “painted drawings” on white backgrounds, created between 2021 and 2022, showing whoever Hockney was able to summon to his Normandy retreat in that strange post-lockdown period, from Harry Styles in an orange and yellow-striped cardie to Hockney’s gardener seated on his motor mower.