David Hockney: A Bigger Picture

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Hockney worked on the painting for four months in late 1971, but dissatisfied with the composition, in particular with the angle of the pool, abandoned the work and started afresh. The show featured large-scale works inspired by the East Yorkshire landscape, including his monumental The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty-eleven). Certainly I’d like the chance to make another longer feature-length film from the material, one that is more in the moment, more experimental, more about the act of questioning – the central impetus of Hockney’s art.

David Hockney: A Bigger Picture - IMDb David Hockney: A Bigger Picture - IMDb

I felt that almost every scene I shot had to be won, and this had consequences in the edit, in the difficulty of divorcing the material from the experience of capturing it and trying to judge the true value of what I had “in the can”.We went back to a more or less chronological narrative, which in turn meant we had to jettison a lot of good synch interview sequences because they showed paintings in the background that in the film timeline had not yet been made. In Portrait the witnessing of two men in a small room and the repetition of the sittings suggested a British comedy of manners and the employment of Alan Bennett to read the voice-over. Die einzigen Fristen, die er akzeptiert, sind jene der Jahreszeiten', schreibt der Hockney-Spezialist Marco Livingstone uber den Kunstler im faszinierenden Katalog zur Ausstellung. So too in general the public and art-historical imagination, they incline towards hagiography and mystification.

David Hockney: A Bigger Picture | Exhibition | Royal Academy

But in the gallery, and almost lifesize, they are marvellous transformations: the alien blossom rampant in its outburst, the shadows on the hot lane bristling like cacti in the desert. It is immense, but even when seen from a distance it brings the viewer very close to objects that are actually small: the jagged blue-green leaves of nettles, yellow-green grasses. The canvas – almost a perfect square – is dominated by the strong vertical and horizontal lines of the trees, the building, and the edge of the pool; it is divided evenly into the sky, building and patio in the upper half, and the pool and diving board in the lower half. The final hang might arguably have improved the final effect, if some 20% fewer works had been included, not only because there is a degree of repetition, but because the walls with the biggest individual works such as, The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire (2011), oil on 32 canvases, each 91. This work brings together two of Hockney's themes from his paintings of the late 1960s and early 1970s: the swimming pool, and the double portrait.In no time we are back to the 90s and The Road to York Through Sledmore, dipping up and down between blazing orange buildings and eye-popping foliage. In the exhibition this will be shown in the same room as a recent series of iPad drawings of Yosemite National Park in California, printed out 12 feet high. More the issue is to find a documentary grammar and form that rhymes with the theme and the subject matter. IPADS David Hockney has always been radical in his use of unconventional technology to make art, from the Polaroid camera and fax machines to the iPhone in 2009, iPad in 2010, and high-definition DVR more recently; the iPad, in a sense, substituted his need for sketchbooks.

Bigger Picture by David Hockney - AbeBooks Bigger Picture by David Hockney - AbeBooks

Sometimes this comes out beautifully, as in Garrowby Hill, where the road is fairly bouncing down the hill, taking the curves very steeply, then narrowing to a distant ribbon. The importance of a sense of place, defines the specificity of these pictures and of the locations they memorialise. Which other living artist has created a modern masterpiece to compare with A Bigger Splash, that stunning diagram of Californian heat and cool water, of liquid blossoming into frozen chaos? His apparent addiction to making images, involves the necessity to maintain a resolution with his mortality, to live life to the full, work intelligently with a team, embrace technology and assert the importance, the supremacy of making with one's hands and mind.

Indeed, in the 2004 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, which Hockney curated, with Allen Jones (reviewed for Studio International), he asserted the supremacy of the drawn image. David Hockney: Tableaux et Dessins, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, October–December 1974 (13, repr. I instinctively knew I was going to like it," Hockney said, "and as I flew over San Bernardino and saw the swimming pools and the houses and everything and the sun, I was more thrilled than I have ever been in arriving in any city. These recent paintings are voluptuous, appreciative, joyous, finding new notations for every change in this small corner of England. At that time he was sitting for a portrait by the late Lucian Freud, and walked every day to Freud’s house from his own London home, through Holland Park.

A Bigger Splash - Wikipedia A Bigger Splash - Wikipedia

At that time I used to think that Far Eastern pictures were all the same, as you do when you don’t know much about something. A lavish production to accompany Hockney's 2012 exhibition at The Royal Academy, later at The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao and Museum Ludwig, Cologne. In “The Road Less Travelled”, the fine catalogue essay by Marco Livingstone, he explains Hockney’s approach to working out in the open, in Yorkshire, as requiring “such dedication for so many years has made him extremely sensitive to the qualities of every season, of specific times of day and a wide variety of weather conditions, and to the opportunities that these offer to the painter intent on conveying his delight in the infinite renewal and beauty of nature”. As the spring developed I realised that I had to move in closer because it was all about what was happening on the ground. All advance tickets until March have been sold, and it is forecast to be the most successful blockbuster exhibition in London, challenging Leonardo da Vinci at the National Gallery and the Royal Academy’s previous record-breaker last year, The Real Van Gogh in its popularity.There is no underlying metaphor or building emotion, no sense of awe or melancholy or even much amazement.