David Hockney RA: The Bigger Picture
21 January - 9 April, 2012
Royal Academy Of Arts - Admission Charge
The landscape artist, John Constable, in his Hampstead series of lectures said painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why then may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy of which pictures are but experiments? (Art & Illusion by Ernst Gombrich) Why not, indeed. The lowly (until the 1800s) genre of landscape painting was elevated in status by Constable’s membership of the Royal Academy, and begun a line of landscapists that includes Paul Nash (1889-1946), and our present-day, David Hockney (b. 1937).
Inquiry into the laws of nature
In the light of the glowing canvases on view at David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture at the Royal Academy of Arts, the words of fellow RA Constable resonate across the centuries. They bring to mind that story, told by Ernst Gombrich, of the friend who remonstrated with Constable because the foregrounds of his paintings were not the mellow brown of an old violin. Constable, with his mind awakened by Enlightenment, held a violin against the grass to demonstrate that grass really is bright green. And roses are red, violets are blue, and cornfields are bright, startling yellow in the mind – and eye – of Hockney. Little wooden-toy farmhouses nestle snugly amid rolling, chequered hills, while bare branches stand starkly against purple, winter skies.
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| The Arrival of
Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven) - 2 January iPad drawing printed on paper 144.1 x 108 cm one of a 52-part work Courtesy of the Artist Copyright David Hockney |
Ernst Gombrich
For the artist cannot transcribe what he sees, he can only translate it into the terms of his medium, wrote Ernst Gombrich. There is no doubt that the computer age has contributed to the vision of Hockney, just as nineteenth-century advances in paint technology was someways behind the rejection by Constable of the “Old Master” browns of Claude and Gainsborough. The truth is, there is no objective way to see art or life. The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 was created on an i-Pad. The image is all at once melancholy and happy; the fall-out of the previous autumn and winter evoked by the predominant blues and mauves of the lower part of the painting while overhead, green branches touch a lemon sky, optimistic with the forthcoming summer. One poignant touch is the way that the ‘overhead’ world is reflected in the purple pool at the foot of the trees, reminiscent of the ‘worlds within worlds’ created by MC Escher. And there is such a lot of world to see.
David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture comprises over 150 works, most of them created in the last eight years, and is open until April 9.
Mary Phelan, 2012