“People are timid about colour”
David Hockney
I am aware of David Hockney in that I know he is considered one of the great artists of the 20th century. I can even identify some of his famous paintings, not to my taste, although there are a couple I quite like. They were usually too garish for me. At the time I started looking into him we were all still getting over his London Underground sign, which I disliked. But then I saw the painting below.
I absolutely love this painting. It’s quite subdued for him. Colour wise. I know he is well known for colourful, vibrant paintings. They are often very simple, uncluttered, even when there are several elements. He tends to pare things down to a very basic idea and adds just enough detail to make the object recognisable.
While reading about him, I learnt that he attributes his love of colour to growing up in Bradford and that it was a reaction to living in a city covered in soot. That makes me appreciate the colours that I used to find garish.
Initially a draughtsmen, Hockney “draws” in an extensive range of mediums and is very experimental. He uses photography, photocopying, old technology like the camera lucida, and modern recent technology – the iPad.
Hockney draws from his life, he doesn’t seem to add anything fantastical. He paints people he knows, pets, his landscape. Even his recent iPad drawings of flowers are the flowers he is given on a daily basis. Other artists I have read about for this first part of my course are trying to make sense of the world as a whole. They take nature, their national psyche, spirituality to figure out life and their place in it. Hockney is painting from a more personal level, working out his environment, his relationships, and his place in the world personally. His place in nature is more meditative.
His still life paintings are incredibly colourful, which makes them vivid and bright. They are not realistic looking. The details tend to be brushstrokes that suggest the detail. To me they look flat, not in a bad way but more in the way that he is trying to capture the essence of something rather then an accurate representation. Using the iPad for his flower series seems to accentuate this.
“To depict nature, we can only try. Nature doesn’t have any straight lines. It doesn’t follow the rules of perspective.”
David Hockney, The Guardian April 2020
Sources
laineyrainjournals.com 