Brenda Zlamany: ‘My last painting of Hockney was as Whistler’s Mother. It’s become a goodbye’

I met David Hockney in 1998 through Maurice Payne, his friend and longtime etching collaborator – and my daughter’s father. I stayed with them that year in the Hollywood Hills and at the beach house in Malibu. I remember sliding plates under David’s nose as he worked on the Dog Wall etchings. He drove me through the canyons in his red Mercedes convertible, top down, music pouring from the speakers.

That year, I sat for two etchings. Walking into the first session, I asked: “Do I set the pose, or do you?” Later, David told Maurice he thought that was pretty cheeky. I was so nervous during the first three-hour sitting that it shows in the portrait. He stared so intently, I felt he could read my mind. For the second, I smoked a cigarette with him beforehand to relax. He captured me in 20 minutes. So I was David’s subject before he was mine.

Over the years, I painted him half a dozen times: in his California garden with his iPad, painting my daughter, Oona, in his studio, a composition that came to me in a dream. Threading through it all were conversations – about shadows, perspective, photography, and the camera lucida, which I first learned about from David and became essential to my own practice. Those conversations are among the most important of my life.

In October 2023, I arrived in London, dropped my suitcase at Maurice’s and went straight to David’s studio, where I found myself at a private concert: Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy playing The Rite of Spring. David sat across the room dressed in black, listening with unmistakable joy. But it was also the first time I saw him as an old man. Something in his posture summoned Whistler’s Mother. I sketched him surreptitiously and spent the evening composing a painting in my head.

That painting, Two Dogs: Portrait of David Hockney Inspired by Whistler’s Mother, is now on view at the Laing art gallery in Newcastle as part of the National Portrait Gallery’s touring exhibition. On the wall behind him, I painted his own etching of his dachshunds, Stanley and Boogie – made during that same 1998 period when I first sat for him. “Dogs” is also American slang for feet, and David’s feet became the tender heart of the painting: the shoes, the bare ankles, unmistakably an old man’s feet. I hid my own reflection in the wine glass – two artists in one canvas, still in conversation.

This morning, I woke to the news of his death, and the painting became something I never intended it to be: a goodbye. David taught us the joy of seeing. One Christmas in East Yorkshire, when Oona was small, he drove us down Woldgate, the country road he filmed through all four seasons, talking about the project and pointing out individual trees. This spring, I returned to England for the opening of my portrait of him and visited his exhibition at the Serpentine.

When I walked out, I can’t fully explain what happened. Every detail in the landscape seemed heightened, felt alive. I could see how David saw, and somehow I could see more. I FaceTimed him from the gallery to tell him so. We spoke about the new portraits he was making, and reverse perspective. He said he was excited about what he was working on.

That was our last conversation.

Brenda Zlamany is a painter who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York

Photograph by Brenda Zlamany