David Hockney: The Art of Seeing

As a landscape painter, it's a big thrill to see a huge landscape exhibition taking pride of place at the Royal Academy, and one which is such a talking point.  

David Hockney's A Bigger Picture really is that - a vast exhibition of big, big paintings, in a big big space (all 13 rooms of the RA), which is ironically filled with huge amounts of sharp-elbowed folk in a marked contrast to the empty people-free calm of the pictures.

Sometimes as a painter of landscape, you feel that you might be considered to be at the edge of things, painting in some sort of old-fashioned sub-genre whilst the real artists get on with cutting sharks in half and embedding skulls with diamonds.  

"Landscape finished?" snorts the eloquently plain-speaking Yorkshireman Hockney in his BBC Culture Show Special film, "Only our way of looking at landscape is finished - so find a new way".  

And here is that new way, with i-Pad print-outs and multiple viewpoint films and great pulsating canvases of colour, all expanding on the sense that landscape is something to be experienced and lived and moved through like life itself.

If you've got any interest in the exhibition, or in landscape, painting, or just the way that paintings make us look at the world afresh and feel alive, then take a look at  David Hockney: The Art of Seeing on BBC i-Player.  It's a treat.

David Hockney painting on location in Yorkshire