After a personal tragedy David Hockney "paints his way out of grief"..

Perhaps it is because the project began in grief that it is so moving.

In 2013 in Hockney’s Yorkshire home his young studio assistant Dominic Elliott died from drinking household bleach while high on ecstasy and cocaine. Hockney was asleep and in no way involved, but he fled Britain, returning to his Los Angeles home. The shock and distress left him “very down” and, exceptionally, unable to paint. It was in this condition that one day he observed his studio manager and amanuensis Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima “sitting with his head in his hands like this” — Hockney imitates the posture with a dramatic fall of his own head.

“I felt like that as well. I said, ‘I’ll paint you like that’. I just went and got a cheap canvas at an art store and painted it.