But if you want to buy her, whether it’s the portrait where her startlingly youthful blue eyes match her sweater, or the one where she looks all of her 96 years, there is a catch. You’ll have to buy the whole family – and his friends, and his housekeeper, and her daughter – at a cost of around pounds 750,000. Where one portrait goes, the other 23 in the set follow, by the artist’s strict instruction. The portraits are showing in London from Thursday; the most important people in Hockney’s life appearing together at the Annely Juda gallery as they do in his mind’s eye, until his 60th birthday on 19 July.
The exhibition is entitled Flowers, Faces and Spaces although Hockney toyed with the more anarchic Fuck You, they’re all Flowers and Portraits. Much has been made of the flower pictures, inspired by a visit to the Vermeer exhibition at The Hague last year, but the portraits, all painted in the past six months, reached London only last week.

The most recent, of the housekeeper’s daughter, Dayanna Fernandez, was finished less than a month ago. Less still has been made of the spaces, within which lie the key to the artist’s desire that the portraits be sold together. “When you put the portraits together they work as an installation,” says David Juda. “It is as much about the spaces between the portraits and in the background colour as it is about the faces.”None of the portraits is framed, appearing as if they were on the wall of Hockney’s studio or sitting-room. Each is the size of a cornflake packet and their vibrant colours, influenced by Hockney’s realisation that the brilliance of Vermeer’s 17th-century palette would outlast Hollywood’s, are repeated throughout so that the eyes of his friend and printmaker Maurice Payne, for example, have their reflection in the background of the portrait of his ex-lover and manager Gregory Evans.Some of the subjects have sat for him hundreds of times from when he was a small boy with a set of crayons.

The pictures gathered together, as perhaps the subjects will be on his 60th birthday when the exhibition ends, include two of his brothers, John and Paul, his sister Margaret and her partner, his friends Driffen and Don Cribb, and Jonathan Silver, curator of the David Hockney museum in Salts Mill, near Bradford, who bought his first Hockney aged 13 for pounds 2 from the teenage artist.”He’s nearly reached 60, three-score years, and you look at life very carefully when you’re 60,” says Mr Silver. “He wanted to have his friends around him and then together in a collection for posterity.”Anne Graves, whose face appears in vivid red and purple among the new portraits, says: “I have sat for David many times since I met him in my teens, but these portraits have a very different, psychological quality Sitting for David is a very intense experience. You have to allow your face to relax because you sit for such a long time not daring to move, and that means things show in your face.”It’s different for all of us now – we’ve had marriages and bereavements and divorces and as David paints, making little noises that tell you whether it’s going well or not, you know he sees all that.”The only words Hockney has permitted in the portraits catalogue are a simple statement: “If you don’t know them, you don’t know enough about them to paint them.” His friends say his portraits of them show he sometimes knows them better than they know themselves.. Margaret Thatcher’s suits and Tory party billboards have robbed the colour blue of its innocence, according to a group of artists who want to reclaim the colour from 18 years of Conservative appropriation. More than 80 artists have contributed to an exhibition in a coffee shop in Notting Hill, west London, on election night this Thursday that aims to emphasise the hue’s associations with nature, religion and beauty.
Entitled “The Big Blue”, the exhibition also examines the diversity of blue. It harks back to older associations such as the blue of Krishna, the Hindu god, and of lapis lazuli, the precious stone treasured throughout the ages. Before its association with Tatton sleaze, blue was used to symbolise purity.Artists from as far afield as South Africa and Turkey are taking part, and the exhibition will feature work by Keith Collins, the lover of the late Derek Jarman, director of the film Blue.The artist Mark Harris is giving the colour more radical political associations by using it to tint photographs of a race riot in America, while David Smithan overlays images of cloudy skies on the cafe’s ceiling.”Almost 20 years of Tory control has made the colour cynical,” said the show’s curator, Peter Lewis.”When I first saw the Conservative Party’s big blue posters, I felt the slogan prevented the blue from really working.

Blue was a beautiful colour pigment that had no relation to party or corporate meaning,” he said.”We want to change the meaning of blue, now so caught up with individualism and corporatism, and return it to a symbol of democracy and hope. The ocean, the infinity of the sky and the heavens go beyond politics and suggest an innocence which has been lost by the appropriation of the colour for Conservative ideology.”. Britain’s murder rate would be at least treble what it is now but for improvements in medicine and the growing skills of surgeons and paramedics, medical and legal experts believe. Many people who are now charged with attempted murder or wounding would, several years ago, have been facing a murder charge, as their victims’ lives would not have been saved.
Latest crime figures for the past 20 years show that while the murder rate has increased slightly, from 616 to 745, attempted murder cases have shot up from 155 to 634, and woundings to endanger life have doubled from 5,885 to 10,445.”The murder rate is artificially low now,” said Professor Bernard Knight, the leading Home Office pathologist who has been involved in a number of high profile cases, including the Fred West murders in Gloucester.”People say there were far more murders in the old days, but the woundings that happen now would have been murders then.