1994
Oversees a revival of his production of The Rake’s Progress at Glyndebourne. Continues with the large-format drawings of family members and friends, which are included along with the portraits of his daschunds in Some Drawings of Family, Friends and Best Friends 1993–1994 at the 1853 Gallery,
at Salts Mill, Saltaire, near Bradford. The show travels on to New York and Los Angeles. Henry Geldzahler dies.

1995
David Hockney: A Drawing Retrospective, a major touring exhibition of Hockney’s drawings, opens at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg and then travels onto the Royal Academy in London and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Paints a series of works called ‘Painting as Performance’ – a variant on his 1993 ‘Painted Environments’ that change according to their computer-controlled lighting. Creates a series of digital photographic compositions printed on a laser-jet printer that confront reality, drawing and photography. The largest and most ambitious panoramic V.N. Paintings (Very New Paintings) are exhibited at LA Louver gallery, Venice, California.

Snails space with vari-lites, ‘Painting as Performance’, 1995–6

1996
In Yorkshire in January, Hockney paints portraits of his family and friends that are shown in March at the 1853 Gallery, Saltaire. While in Holland, Hockney sees a Vermeer retrospective at the Royal Cabinet of Paintings, Mauritshuis, The Hague. Struck by the lasting vibrancy of the colour and the way Vermeer controlled light, he returns to his Los Angeles studio with renewed vigour and begins a series of flower study paintings and portraits in oil.

Jonathan Silver, 1996

Ann Graves, February 28 1997, 1997

1997
The exhibition Flowers, Faces and Spaces takes place at Annely Juda Fine Art in London. Included in the show are new still lifes and direct portrait heads painted in oil with a fauvist palette. In June he drives between Los Angeles and Santa Fe, admiring the immensity of the American West on the way. Made a Companion of Honour by the Queen. During the summer he spends several months driving across the Yorkshire Wolds between Bridlington and York to visit his friend, Jonathan Silver, who is dying. These drives result in a series of landscape paintings in oil rendered in a rich palette. On his return to Los Angeles he completes a large two-panel painting of Salt’s Mill, Saltaire, for Silver and continues to paint Yorkshire landscapes from memory. In December David Hockney: Retrospektive Photoworks opens at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.

North Yorkshire, 1997

1998
Continues with Yorkshire landscapes, culminating with Garrowby Hill. Sees Thomas Moran’s retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, dc, which includes paintings of the Grand Canyon. From February to May he paints A Bigger Grand Canyon, made up of sixty small canvases and based on Grand Canyon with Ledge, Arizona, October 1982 Collage #2, made in May 1986. The painting is exhibited at the National Museum of American Art, Washington, dc. From September to November he paints
A Closer Grand Canyon, a 96-panel painting in which the viewer is invited further into the space. This time the painting is based on drawings and memory with no reference to photography. Also experiments with new techniques
in a series of etchings of flowers, chairs and portraits, working with Maurice Payne who sets up a print studio in Hockney’s Hollywood Hills home. The landscape paintings are exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and at LA Louver gallery, Venice, California.

Garrowby Hill, 1998

1999
Hockney’s mother dies in May. The exhibition David Hockney: Espace/Paysage, which traces Hockney’s ideas about space and landscape from the 1960s to the present, opens at the Centre Georges Pompidou and then travels to Germany. Dialogue avec Picasso, the first exhibition by a living artist at the Picasso Museum opens in Paris. Hockney sees Portraits by Ingres: Images of an Epoch, at the National Gallery in London. Convinced that Ingres used a camera lucida to obtain accurate likenesses of
people he met, Hockney begins experimenting with the tool himself and in March begins the first of 280 portrait drawings. Hockney begins to research how the Old Masters achieved such accurate depictions of the world around them, discovering that they used mirrors and lenses. Art historians, museum staff and friends are all drawn into the debate. An article about his discoveries is published in the summer issue of the RA Magazine. Participates in ‘Ingres and Portraiture’ symposium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in September.

David Hockney at the Grand Canyon, September 1998