At the start of the year, Hockney is in Beirut, making preparatory sketches for a set of etchings, Illustrations from Fourteen Poems from C. P. Cavafy, to be printed back in London with Maurice Payne. The images, mostly delicate line drawings of intimate scenes between men, are inspired by the writings of the Greek Egyptian poet Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933), [NESTED]whom Hockney has adored since his days at the Royal College of Art, in particular for his vivid, unapologetic evocations of homosexual desire.

For a revival of Ubu Roi at London’s Royal Court Theatre, Hockney does his first theater design work. He is reluctant to do it but enticed by the instructions of the absurdist playwright Alfred Jarry, which forbid traditional scenery. 

Hockney returns again this year to L.A., and moves into a studio on Pico Boulevard. “Every time you put the gas on, cockroaches sped away from the oven, but I didn’t mind. I never had a phone put in, because right outside the door was a phone booth and I kept quarters and dimes to [NESTED]make phone calls.” Teaching drawing at the University of California, Los Angeles, over the summer, he meets Peter Schlesinger, who becomes his frequent model as well as romantic partner. 

After meeting the arts patron Betty Freeman, Hockney captures the glamour of the Southern Californian lifestyle in the painting Beverly Hills Housewife, of a tall blonde staring out the window of her modernist, cactus-decorated home. The twelve-foot-long painting is made of two joined canvases due to the limited space in Hockney’s studio—“I could never get more than about five feet away”—and plays with the stylized depiction of rays of light hitting glass-wall surfaces. It is the first painting he bases on his own preparatory black-and-white photography; in doing so he rearranges the elements of Freeman’s house and garden to better suit the composition.

In works such as Sunbather and Portrait of Nick Wilder, the effect of light landing on water is as much the subject of the paintings as their human figures.