In the studio with Brenda Zlamany: the contemporary portraitist who got her start with David Hockney

Brenda Zlamany regards portraiture as an act of profound vulnerability — on the part of the artist, not the subject. ‘People don’t realise that the vulnerability is in the artist, because how you see the subject is going to be under the microscope’, the American painter says. She is well versed in the topic, having experience on both sides of the canvas. She has painted David Hockney, and she has sat as his subject. Two of Hockney’s portraits, Brenda and Brenda with a cigarette are included in Christie’s Prints & Multiples sale in New York from 27-28 October 2023. They are part of a grouping of etchings he completed in the late 1990s offered in the sale, 10 of which are coming from Zlamany.

Zlamany's own portraits have been described as ‘a combination of Old Master technique with a postmodern conceptual approach’, but when she first met Hockney in the late 1980s she was working as a master printer at Jeryl Parker Editions in New York City. Having graduated from Wesleyan University with a degree in printmaking, she moved to New York in 1981. Her first job as a waitress didn’t pan out — she got fired after a week for talking too much with the customers.

She recalls that when she read the words ‘Intaglio Printer Wanted’ in the Village Voice, she wondered aloud, ‘Is that a real job?’ But she made the call anyway. Jeryl Parker was starting a press with Bob Feldman as publisher, and he needed a master printer. Zlamany had no real experience, but Parker’s wife was giving birth the day she called. Desperate for extra help, he hired her on the spot.

When she first stepped into the studio, she asked, ‘Do you think we’re going to work with any real artists?’ The first to come in was David Salle. As she puts it, ‘We had everyone in that studio — Chuck Close, Julian Schnabel, Vija Celmins, Alex Katz, Jean-Michel Basquiat...’ She remembers the 1980s as a unique moment in printmaking — ‘There’s never been a group of people like that since.’ Hockney, of course, was one of them.

Hockney’s willingness to explore new media — from fax machines to iPads — is widely known, and his early interest in printmaking was no exception. He first took to it in 1954 as a student at the Bradford College of Art, and he continued to experiment with various techniques whilst working at Parker’s studio and separately with Zlamany’s partner at the time, Maurice Payne.

As Hockney put it when speaking with Christie’s in 2018, ‘Anyone who likes drawing or mark-making would like to explore new media. I’m not a mad technical person, but anything visual appeals to me. In linocuts, for example, everything has to be bold. You don’t make tiny, thin lines in a linocut, it would be too niggly. But get an etching plate, it’s all about fine lines. Anybody who draws will enjoy that sort of variety of graphic medium because it requires inventiveness.’

Zlamany retired from the print studio in 1984 to focus on portrait painting, but as the years passed and Hockney continued to work with Payne, the two artists continued to orbit each other, and their friendship deepened.

In 1998, Zlamany and her partner were invited to stay with Hockney as he and Payne worked on etchings at the artist’s home in California. She recalls, ‘I was in the print studio, watching the entire process of this body of work. Each image was created slowly — stroke by stroke. When you look at them you really feel David observing the subject at hand.’ With the print shop set up at Hockney’s home in West Hollywood, David was involved in every aspect of the printing process.

One of Hockney's 11 etchings from this period that are featured in the sale, Brenda with a cigarette (1998), is a portrait of Brenda. It shows her leaning towards the viewer, legs and arms crossed, left hand grasping her forearm, right hand holding a cigarette. The lines on her face are etched out, as is the mark gradually forming on her clenched arm. It is informal and candid — the instantly recognisable pose of a friend deeply involved in conversation. Etching is a gradual process, but Hockney expertly uses the medium to capture fleeting moments like this, before the cigarette burns out.

‘I don’t smoke, but David smokes, and in this portrait, I’m holding a cigarette, taking a bit of him in,’ says Zlamany. ‘With portraiture you see what the artist thinks of the subject. The gaze acts as a filter, so when David made this, I saw how he saw me.’

She continues, ‘This group of etchings is about David looking deeply and slowly at objects and people in his intimate life. They represent a specific moment and a place. They are a time capsule. There’s a remarkable involvement with the copper plate, the printer, the etching process and the proofing — a deep engagement with the medium that is revealing. You see David experimenting with line as language.’