David Hockney, artist and art
Born July 1937, Birth Bradford, England.
The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, California, USA.
Style and technique, exhibitions: Praemium Imperiale Award, Painting, Photography, Pop Art, Collage,Artist biography, artworks, statement, interview, review, exhibition:
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As an artist David Hockey is easy to get wrong. For years viewers have responded to the extrovert hedonism of his California pictures, the swimming pools, the sensual lifestyle, the uninhibited colours, the recognisable images. Hockney too has always been recognised as a wonderful draftsman. At a time when some art schools no longer thought that drawing was part of an artist’s necessary repertory of skills. And no-one could ever doubt Hockney’s fluency, prolific nature or his versatility…
English painter, printmaker, photographer and stage designer. Perhaps the most popular and versatile British artist of the 20th century, Hockney made apparent his facility as a draughtsman while studying at Bradford School of Art between 1953 and 1957, producing portraits and observations of his surroundings under the influence of the Euston Road School and of Stanley Spencer…
Website dedicated to the artist (French)
Works in the collection of National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Hockney photographed the Grand Canyon in 1982. He commented later that he wanted ‘to photograph the unphotographable. Which is to say, space … [T]here is no question … that the thrill of standing on that rim of the Grand Canyon is spatial. It is the biggest space you can look out over that has an edge…’
The subject of the paintings is the landscape of East Yorkshire, which first engaged Hockney’s imagination as a teenager when he worked on the land during summer holidays, stooking corn. As an adult, Hockney has intermittently returned to this part of England when visiting his mother and sister at their home in the coastal town of Bridlington. However, he has only became fully absorbed by the landscape over the past four years, making it the primary source of inspiration for his art. Attracted by the space and light of East Yorkshire, where he has said one experiences “the sorts of wide vistas you get all the time in the American West,” Hockney first addressed this pastoral landscape in watercolor. These earlier works were the subject of L.A. Louver’s exhibition Hand Eye Heart in March 2005. The watercolor medium allowed Hockney to work quickly en plein air to capture the changing light and its effect upon the land. Returning to the same locales, Hockney is now approaching the subject in oil, while still painting primarily in situ. Loading his car with easels, canvases and paints, Hockney drives to his chosen destination and sets up his tools. Then he sits for a couple of hours looking at the landscape, absorbing the landscape, before picking up a paintbrush. This quiet but intent observation is followed by feverish activity to capture the essence of what he sees. Hockney conveys the land and light in electric color, bringing to the canvases his love of place, both freshly observed and infused by decades of experience and the memories that it conjures of childhood days.In creating these paintings, Hockney eschews all use of photography, which standardizes color, flattens perspective and pushes the viewer away from things – as he has stated, “The camera sees geometrically – we must see psychologically.” As such, in Hockney’s paintings, one is brought present into the land- scape with an immediacy that is filtered through the artist’s own experience of place, both felt and remembered. L.A. Louver