A Bigger Picture - David Hockney Exhibition Part 2

Just as we are coming into spring itself here, so you progress through the seasons in the massive Hockney exhibition.  

I left you earlier in the week half way through the show - now, in Room 7, is the explosion of Hawthorn Blossom with the depiction of what Hockney calls 'Action Week'.

David Hockney Hawthorne Blossom, Woldgate No. 6 2009 (oil on canvas, 60 x 72) 

 

I wasn't so keen on these pictures, although Hockney obviously found the experience of the hedgerows and lanes bursting forth with frothy, creamy fullness and the whole expulsion of bounty a very... exciting experience.  Instead of delicate forms, the resulting foam-laden branches take on the guise of sea-creatures, writhing about in an agitated manner like some over-inflated Roger Dean stage set.

 

Room 8 is Trees and Totems, and the mood changes to one of the cycle of life, and to death and decay.  Hockney takes something almost insignificant, a dead tree stump in the woods near Woldgate, and turns it into an iconically massive motif.

David Hockney Winter Timber 2009, oil on 15 canvases (36 x 48" each) 108 x 240"

 

 

 

 

 

There it is on the right side of Winter Timber, right on the golden section, dividing up the painting into parts with two completely different eyelines.  Here are quick, fluid brushtrokes in purple, cadmium yellow, coerillium and viridian.  In further paintings, the truncated form of the 'totem' becomes a motif of the inevitability of death, like Rembrandt's flayed ox.  Given that Hockney himself is not in the first flush of youth, it is quite a potent image.

There are also some lovely, lyrical charcoal drawings in this room, drawn from observation and uncluttered by colour.  Like most of Hockney's work, they have little sky, but a lovely rhythmic balance of light and dark.

 David Hockney 'Cut Trees' 2008

The Arrival of Spring fills room 9 (4 more to go, but I didn't know this at the time as, in the scrum to get in, I hadn't been given my included-in-the-price guidebook).  

In this room are 51 prints from an i-Pad and one large painting.  Hockney uses his i-Pad as an image-making tool, and in planning the final prints as large-scale, so makes adjustments to colour and form that are needed for the change in scale and mdeium from hand-held i-Pad to Royal Academy wall.  It's no wonder this room has a sense of theatricality - Hockney used to design stage sets, and indeed, built a stage-set model of the Royal Academy with miniature print-outs of all the paintings for the planning of the layout of the show.  

Here is Hockney, with his painting The Arrival of Spring, as big as a theatrical backdrop.

But centre stage is the drama of nature, like a technicolour Judy Garland musical.  The pictures are dated, so you follow through the coming of spring from the almost undetectable to the blazing fanfare, in sometimes almost shimmeringly 3D paintings. 

The focus is down on the vegetation, rather than the sky, and all this bursting, undulating, writhing force of nature is strangely contained within their little rectangular boxes.  There are no people in the paintings, although there are cars and road-signs and some ruined buildings.  There are reminders of people, like some post-apocalyptic world where nature has taken over.  This contrasts strangely with the heaving hurly burly of humanity that fills the Royal Academy trying to look at these paintings.  None of them featured in the Hockney's miniature stage-set of the show.

Feeling that the show has reached a certain climax, you do wonder what could possibly be next.  Room 10 is The Sermon on the Mount, which is not my favourite work.  This is a painting by 17th Century French artist Claude Lorraine, which Hockney has digitally 'spring cleaned' and then reinterpreted on a huge scale.  What you are faced with is Christ giving a directive from a massive throbbing red edifice, like Tatlin's Tower, or a giant carrot.

Once you think 'giant carrot', you just can't take it seriously, especially when you are so tired, so hot, and have been jostled to bits by fellow visitors for a couple of hours by now.

Then it's on to films.  Or it would be, if you could get anywhere near them.  The rooms are packed, so you can't just leisurely stroll in, sit down in the middle, and enjoy the multi-screen experience as it is meant to be viewed.  

Hockney strapped small video cameras on to apparatus and drove down country lanes to take films of the countryside and hedgerows from multiple viewpoints, which are then projected onto multiple screens.

Each is a different experience of the same thing, a different bit of time.  There are other films, including one in an office, and some flexible young men and furniture, but I could only see them from a very oblique angle near the doorway.

With the end in sight, and the smell of the gift shop in my nostrils, it was a quick dash through Yosemite at the end, and out into the piles of catalogues.  "This place just gives me a headache,"  sighed the gift shop lady behind the counter, "All the people.  All the heat.  All day."

It's a truly amazing exhibition.  It has to be seen to be believed, and it catapults landscape into the 21st century as a vast multi-media, multi-experience, great cutting-edge visceral roaring thing that is at the very heart of life itself.  

Hockney makes landscape into the most important thing you could ever, ever have a painting about.  Not all of it is great.  Not all of it is stuff you'd want to have in your front room.  But at 74 years old, it's hats off to the sheer human energy and dynamism of this plain-speaking visionary man.

If you're like to watch a 3-minute gallop through the show, then you can watch The Telegraph's art critic Alistair Sooke in this video, which is part of his on-line review of the show.

Telegraph review of David Hockney with video

 

A Bigger Picture - David Hockney Exhibition

Now, it does seem as if I'm banging on a bit about David Hockney, but it's a major exhibition of landscape, and I haven't mentioned the actual exhibition yet.

If you've had a look at the BBC film The Art of Seeing, then you'll have seen the exhibition being hung in the Royal Academy, with lots of lovely space where you can stand back from the paintings and contemplate.

However, if you visit the Royal Academy, you will be battling with crowds from the moment you enter the courtyard.  Crowds queueing on the off-chance of a day ticket, crowds going up the stairs, in the entrance hall, through the gift shop, and even with a timed ticket, crowds packing every one of the 13 huge rooms.  It's a physically huge show, with huge, searingly bright paintings, and the heat of huge numbers of people bumbling about trying to look at them and read the labels.  It's exhausting (but worth it), and with 150 paintings on show, it's impossible to talk in depth about any of them here.

The first room has 4 versions of the same group of trees done in the four seasons.  It is painted from memory, and sets the theme of the show - that landscape is all about experiencing a motif through time, that it is something to be moved through and lived through, something basic at the centre of our lives and not something peripheral.  Naturally, as a landscape artist,  that's something I'd endorse - landscape isn't just about trees! 

The next room, with its earlier works, has the simply stunning A Closer Grand Canyon from 1998.  Now, I've been to the Grand Canyon, and this really is the closest thing you'll get to the experience of being there.  

It's a vast, volvanically bright painting on 60 canvasses, and like the real thing, has no focal point and a high horizon which plunges your eyes dizzyingly downwards.  It's just amazing.

Then there are photomontages of the Grand Canyon and the Pearblossom Highway.  Reminding me rather of Rauschenberg's Glut series, these are picaresque patchworks of photographs recording a journey, and the movement through a landscape.

Pearblossom Highway (1986)

Room 3 has Yorkshire landscapes (Hockney's native landscape), but there's no dull greys here.  The Road to York Through Sledmore has red houses, lilac shadows, lime trees and a high horizon, like an urban Grand Canyon.

Roads and fields curve and writhe and undulate like snakes, and the paint is dabbed and combed into shape, as in Garrowby Hill (1998).

Battling past the students armed with sketchpads, Room 4 has watercolours and landscapes from observation.  Here, paintings are hung together in large groups.  Whilst individually, if you popped some of these in a local art show without a Hockney signature, you might be inclined to think "How did that get in?", the cumulative effect here is of a joyous abundance of nature.  There is a lovely sense of the actuality of real places, that you can identify real wheatfields, hedges or clumps of thistles, something which is important in my own work.  It elevates the mundane, that which is normally only glimpsed on the way to something more important.

Room 5 is 'Tunnels', again returning to a single motif through the seasons with some lovely work.

Winter Tunnel with Snow (2006)

Room 6 is Woldgate Woods, where Hockney placed an easel at a particular point amongst the trees and returned to it throughout 2006.  There are some lovely charcoal drawings here, and the denseness of the tree branches in the paintings with little sky, along with the way the paint is applied,  gives a lively surface texture like that of Monet's Waterlilies.

Woldgate Woods, November (2006)

At this point in the exhibition, you are beginning to wonder how many rooms are left, and how to pace yourself, but in fact you are only about half way through - so that's where I'm leaving it for today!