What and So What?
I saw a retrospective of David Hockney’s work about 3 years ago at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. I hadn’t known too much about his work, other than being able to pick out the really well-known motifs such as swimming pools, such as his 1972 painting, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), acrylic on canvas, private collection, which I thought was interesting because of his observation and depiction of moving water, a thing I had always found difficult. The colours on this and much of his other “famous” work are bright and zingy, and so I remember being quite surprised at the muted palette of his very early pictures. However, what really caught my eye were the large tessellated images, both paintings on canvas and iPad as well as video camera synchronised film clips.
I watched an interview with David Hockney on a film called “EXHIBITION ON SCREEN: David Hockney RA” by Seventh Art Productions which was published by the Royal Academy on 15th April 2020, and in which he talks about the creation of some of these latter works for the RA’s 2012 Exhibition, “A Bigger Picture”. He had been invited to fill the RA’s Main Galleries with a series of works depicting his native Yorkshire. Part of the film showed the galleries and the way the pictures were presented, and again I was struck by a series of paintings filling one wall as a tessellated grid – the 2004 series Midsummer, East Yorkshire – see film, 12:58 in, and https://thedavidhockneyfoundation.org/series/midsummer-east-yorkshire. The pictures were all different, but the overall effect was striking and drew the viewer in to look closer. He discussed the importance of careful observation and finding a way to make marks and develop a language to express what you see.
He also talked about his use of the iPad as a drawing tool , which he used to draw a series of pictures to depict The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire, 2011(see 25th February, right) – the great gain, he says, is speed, although you lose resistance, but the range of marks you can make is huge.
Now what?
Two aspects of all this interest me – the presentation of a set of images in tessellated form, and the use of the iPad for drawing.
In my river study I have become fascinated by the observation of the multitude of moods of the water and the patterns it makes, dependant upon the ambient light, the depth of the water, the presence of obstacles and the rate of flow – I can see the depiction of all this becoming a major strand of my investigation. With this in mind, I have begun experimenting with an app called Sketchbook on my iPad, trying to get to know some of its features and trying out its suitability for this task. I am making a pdf booklet in Pages to assemble all the iPad images I create and explain the effects and tools used in each case (if I can find out how to link it to the blog I will, otherwise will submit it as a separate document), but here are four:
I can already see, just by trying to tessellate these four images here, that the selection of what goes where is going to be a skill in itself…..
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