Hockney’s Bigger Picture: On light and colour #3
Straight from my Chihuly encounter last weekend, I went to see the David Hockney show at the Royal Academy – so you can see why I’ve been thinking about light and colour! I have always been ambivalent about Hockney’s work – I saw one of his newer big landscapes in York last February, which left me cold compared to the seventeenth-century still lifes in the next room. So, for me, this show was a revelation and a joy.
Hockney’s landscape series are post-modern impressionism, using bold and bright colours to evoke the Yorkshire landscapes which he clearly loves (although an early large painting of the Grand Canyon is also particularly striking). The series show the changing seasons in small, focused areas of countryside, and evoke spectacularly how such simple views shine and glow in different lights and different elements of nature. One series of Hawthorne blossom shows his joy in this short-lived spring flowering which turns the hedgerows white overnight. Another focuses on a particular road, which Hockney calls ‘the Tunnel,’ highlighting how it changes subtly in different lights and seasons. In a third, he focuses on a single tree stump, or ‘totem,’ making bold images of this stark clearing in bright colours. It is striking how he moves between observation and imagination in working on these different sets of landscapes.
What is also fascinating is Hockney’s continued engagement with changing technology. His early works used photo collages and I am intrigued by the ways in which he builds his grids of canvases out of photos, in some cases photographing the canvases themselves to view the entire work assembled on a computer. One room in the show is devoted to his video works, where he has filmed roads in different seasons (similarly to the painted series) across nine cameras mounted onto a car, and then combined the images into a single montage. He has likewise shot dancers in a brightly-coloured studio with his works on the walls, who move disjointedly across the nine screens. I did feel, however, that these two sets of film works should have been shown separately, as they were so visually opposite.
More recently, Hockney has started to draw very successfully on an iPad, and one room in the show features 51 images over five months of Woldgate in East Yorkshire. I find the marks and colours that the iPad allows/requires him to make particularly effective, and am interested by the ways in which he allows for the images to be printed at a much larger scale than the iPad screen. A small adjacent room places iPads with the ‘originals’ of these works alongside his older, more traditional, sketchbooks. This digital art seems particularly suited to Hockney’s use of mark and colour which makes the most of visible texture and pattern in his landscapes. He seems in so many ways a postmodern i(m)Pressionist.