by Gerald Boerner
“Anything simple always interests me.”
— David Hockney
“You do need to be interested in people.”
— David Hockney
“I think Picasso was, without doubt, the greatest portraitist of the 20th century, if not any other century.”
— David Hockney
Picasso’s portraits "tell you about the people. He’s looked at them, and they have something different from anybody else.”
— David Hockney
“It is very good advice to believe only what an artist does, rather than what he says about his work.”
— David Hockney
“But slowly I began to use cameras and then think about what it was that was going on. It took me a long time, I mean I actually played with cameras and photography for about 20 years.”
— David Hockney
“The mind is the limit. As long as the mind can envision the fact that you can do something, you can do it, as long as you really believe 100 percent.”
— David Hockney
“I made a photograph of a garden in Kyoto, the Zen garden, which is a rectangle. But a photograph taken from any one point will not show, well it shows a rectangle, but not with ninety degree angles.”
— David Hockney
“But the moment you use an ordinary camera, you are not seeing the picture, remember, meaning, you had to remember what you’ve taken. Now you could see it of course, with a digital thing, but remember in 1982 you couldn’t.”
— David Hockney
“Shadows sometimes people don’t see shadows. The Chinese of course never paint them in pictures, oriental art never deals with shadow. But I noticed these shadows and I knew it meant it was sunny.”
— David Hockney
“There are painters who are very good who are not necessarily portraitists; Richard Diebenkorn painted the figure in a very interesting way, but not particularly portraits. He didn’t care too much about the psychology of it.”
— David Hockney
“Remember that big pot that’s in Mexico City, that big serpent pot? I think they had it at the RA in the Aztecs show. Well, when Cortez [the Spanish conquistador of Mexico in the 16th century] saw that pot, it was the ugliest thing in the world, because it was meant to hold hot human hearts still pumping. It took them 300 years before they began to see the beauty in the pot. The use was so horrible, it would overpower form.”
— David Hockney
David Hockney (Born: 1937)
David Hockney, CH, RA, is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer, who is based in Bridlington, Yorkshire, although he also maintains a base in London. An important contributor to the Pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the twentieth century.
Life
Hockney was born in Bradford and educated first at Wellington Primary School. He later went to Bradford Grammar School, Bradford College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, where he met R. B. Kitaj. While still a student at the Royal College of Art, Hockney was featured in the exhibition Young Contemporaries—alongside Peter Blake—that announced the arrival of British Pop Art. He became associated with the movement, but his early works also display expressionist elements, not dissimilar to certain works by Francis Bacon. Sometimes, as in We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961), named after a poem by Walt Whitman, these works make reference to his love for men.
From 1963 Hockney was represented by the influential art dealer John Kasmin. In 1963 Hockney visited New York, making contact with Andy Warhol. Later, a visit to California, where he lived for many years, inspired Hockney to make a series of paintings of swimming pools in Los Angeles using the comparatively new Acrylic medium, rendered in a highly realistic style using vibrant colours. In 1967, his painting, Peter Getting Out Of Nick’s Pool, won the John Moores Painting Prize at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. He also made prints, portraits of friends, and stage designs for the Royal Court Theatre, Glyndebourne, La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.
The "Joiners"
David Hockney has also worked with photography, or, more precisely, photocollage. Using varying numbers of small Polaroid snaps or photolab-prints of a single subject Hockney arranged a patchwork to make a composite image. Because these photographs are taken from different perspectives and at slightly different times, the result is work which has an affinity with Cubism, an affinity which was one of Hockney’s major aims – discussing the way human vision works. Some of these pieces are landscapes such as Pearblossom Highway #2, others being portraits, e.g. Kasmin 1982, and My Mother, Bolton Abbey, 1982.
These photomontage works appeared mostly between 1970 and 1986. He referred to them as "joiners". He began this style of art by taking Polaroid photographs of one subject and arranging them into a grid layout. The subject would actually move while being photographed so that the piece would show the movements of the subject seen from the photographer’s perspective. In later works Hockney changed his technique and moved the camera around the subject instead.
Hockney’s creation of the "joiners" occurred accidentally. He noticed in the late sixties that photographers were using cameras with wide-angle lenses to take pictures. He did not like such photographs because they always came out somewhat distorted. He was working on a painting of a living room and terrace in Los Angeles. He took Polaroid shots of the living room and glued them together, not intending for them to be a composition on their own. Upon looking at the final composition, he realized it created a narrative, as if the viewer was moving through the room. He began to work more and more with photography after this discovery and even stopped painting for a period of time to exclusively pursue this new style of photography. Frustrated with the limitations of photography and its ‘one eyed’ approach, he later returned to painting.
Later works
A Bigger Splash, 1967
In 1974, Hockney was the subject of Jack Hazan’s film, A Bigger Splash (named after one of Hockney’s swimming pool paintings from 1967).
In 1977 David Hockney authored a book, including the poetry of Wallace Stevens, of etchings called "The Blue Guitar: Etchings By David Hockney Who Was Inspired By Wallace Stevens Who Was Inspired By Pablo Picasso". The etchings, inspired by and meant to represent the themes of Stevens’ poem, "The Man With The Blue Guitar". It was published as a portfolio and as a book in Spring, 1997 by Petersburg Press.
Hockney was commissioned to design the cover and a series of pages for the December 1985 issue of the French edition of Vogue magazine. Consistent with his interest in Cubism and admiration for Pablo Picasso, Hockney chose to paint Celia Birtwell (who appears in several of his works) with different views—her facial features as if the eye had scanned her face diagonally.
Another important commission of his was to draw with the Quantel Paintbox, a computer program that allowed the artist to sketch direct onto the monitor screen. This commission was taken by Hockney in December 1985. Using this program was similar to drawing on the PET film for prints which he had much experience in. His work created using the Quantel formed part of a BBC series featuring a number of artists.
A Bigger Grand Canyon, 1998, National Gallery of Australia.
His A Bigger Grand Canyon, a series of 60 paintings which combined to produce one enormous picture, was bought by the National Gallery of Australia for $4.6 million.
On 21 June 2006, his painting of The Splash fetched £2.6 million – a record for a Hockney painting.
In October 2006 the National Portrait Gallery in London organized one of the largest ever displays of Hockney’s portraiture work, including 150 of his paintings, drawings, prints, sketchbooks and photocollages from over the course of five decades. The collection consisted of his earliest self-portraits up into his latest work completed in 2005. The exhibition proved to be one of the most successful in the gallery’s history, and Hockney himself assisted in displaying the works. The exhibition ran until January 2007.
In June 2007, Hockney’s largest painting, Bigger Trees Near Warter, which measures 15 x 40-foot, was hung in the Royal Academy’s largest gallery in their annual Summer Exhibition. This work "is a monumental-scale view of a coppice in Hockney’s native Yorkshire, between Bridlington and York. It was painted on 50 individual canvases, mostly working in situ, over five weeks last winter." In 2008, he donated this work to the Tate Gallery in London, saying: "I thought if I’m going to give something to the Tate I want to give them something really good. It’s going to be here for a while. I don’t want to give things I’m not too proud of…I thought this was a good painting because it’s of England…it seems like a good thing to do".
Many of Hockney’s works are now housed in a converted industrial building called Salts Mill, in Saltaire, near his home town of Bradford.
Since 2009, Hockney has made drawings using the Brushes iPhone application. He spoke with Lawrence Weschler in an interview:
"It’s always there in my pocket, there’s no thrashing about, scrambling for the right color. One can set to work immediately, there’s this wonderful impromptu quality, this freshness, to the activity; and when it’s over, best of all, there’s no mess, no clean-up. You just turn off the machine. Or, even better, you hit Send, and your little cohort of friends around the world gets to experience a similar immediacy. There’s something, finally, very intimate about the whole process."
Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:
David Hockney that can be found at…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hockney
