Created while sheltering at his home in the French countryside last year, as the first wave of lockdowns swept the globe, the series of landscapes, speak to the liberating power of creativity.
“We need art, and I do think it can relieve stress,” Hockney said
When lockdown hit us all, Hockney seemed to go into overdrive and produced more than a hundred images on his iPad in the space of a few weeks, which allowed him to capture the range of perspectives and light experienced during the changes over one year.
A Year in Normandie shows the succession of seasons in the form of an eighty-meter-long frieze, also heralding the re-opening of the Musée de l’Orangerie, following the closure due to COVID 19.
David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020
While all of us were wondering where lockdown would lead us – David Hockney knew he could deliver something that would relieve not only his own worries but would help others. This article used his own words to describe his efforts.
‘We need art, and I do think it can relieve stress,’
At 83 he continues to create wherever he is living, exploring and bringing to us different ways of seeing. He has set up his new home in Normandy, and is reflecting on the changing seasons and the landscape around.
His home for the time being is in Normandy France:
In some ways he was happy to have a project, on his doorstep, with little disturbance during lockdown:
“I knew that to do anything really worthwhile at my age, I’d have to isolate myself,”
“Then came the lockdown in March, and I didn’t mind at all because it meant there wouldn’t be any visitors, and I could get a long run on work. And I did.” “It is a seven dwarfs house in the middle of a 4-acre field. There was a shack that had a cider press in it that could be made into a studio, which we did.
I began drawing the winter trees on a new iPad,”
“Then this virus started… “I went on drawing the winter trees that eventually burst into blossom. This is the stage we are right now. Meanwhile the virus is going mad, and many people said my drawings were a great respite from what was going on.”
“I have been working this year, 2020, to depict the arrival of spring in Normandy. This takes about three months, and I think it’s the most exciting thing nature has to offer in this part of the world. When the lockdown came… we were in a house in the middle of a four-acre field full of fruit trees. I could concentrate on one thing, I did at least one drawing a day with the constant changes going on, all around the house. I kept drawing the winter trees, and then the small buds that became the blossom, and then the full blossom. Then the leaves started, and eventually the blossom fell off leaving a small fruit and leaves, this process took about two weeks, all the time I was getting better at my mark making on the screen, eventually doing, à la Monet, the water lilies in the pond.”
“The world is very, very beautiful if you look at it. But most people don’t look very much. They scan the ground in front of them so they can walk, but they don’t really look at things incredibly well, with intensity. I do, and I’ve always known that.”
When we finished that, I thought I’d start the arrival of spring, but I drew all around the house first, and spring was really over before I got it down.”
“I began with drawing the bare trees in March, and in April the first blossoms came out, and I drew that,” he said. “Then there were more blossoms, and the leaves began to grow. Then the blossoms would fall off, and you’d have just the leaves. Eventually, the leaves would fall off and it would be autumn.”
He advises us all to forget the camera (as you know he has a love/hate relationship with photography) and take up a pencil or brush:
“I would suggest people could draw at this time,”
“Question everything and do not think about photography.”
“We need art, and I do think it can relieve stress,” he said. “What is stress? It’s worrying about something in the future. Art is now.”
“I like solitude. I am very aware we are part of nature.”
“What I am doing here is eventually to make my iPad drawings into something like the Bayeux tapestry, ie you will walk past it. The Bayeux tapestry is 90 metres long. It contains no shadows, no reflections and certainly no perspective as that would stop time. It would look very odd. Bayeux is 40 minutes’ drive from here. In European art history it is ignored. Why? It is like a Chinese scroll: very sophisticated. In a book I read recently called 1066, the author dismissed it as cartoonish. I concluded he wasn’t very visual.”
“This morning is cloudy here and there has been some frost that affects the blossom a bit, but I’ll find something to draw.”
Here I’m right in the middle of it, and I get to know the trees really well. This is a kind of paradise for me.”
“The only real things in life are food and love in that order.
His I-Pad paintings have been printed for exhibition
I really believe this and the source of art is love.
“I love life.”
“We have lost touch with nature rather foolishly as we are a part of it, not outside it. This will in time be over and then what? What have we learned? I am 83 years old, I will die. The cause of death is birth.
Most of us may not be feeling so positive about life at present – but David Hockney allows us a little respite through his ipad paintings.
Hockney wrote to the BBC and sent his gift of some paintings and his philosophical thoughts:
“We have lost touch with nature rather foolishly as we are a part of it, not outside it. This will in time be over and then what? What have we learned? I am 83 years old, I will die. The cause of death is birth.
“The only real things in life are food and love in that order, just like our little dog ruby. I really believe this and the source of art is love.
“I love life.”
“Why are my iPad drawings seen as a respite from the news? Well, they are obviously made by the hand depicting the renewal that is the spring in this part of the world.”
David Hockney, reaching the age of 80, is being celebrated in Los Angeles with exhibitions of his work. What is interesting is that much of his work on show, is either self portraits (mainly paintings) and his photographic work -his ‘joiners’ or photo collages.
Even though, Hockney himself, challenges photography in terms of being static and time bound, his legacy still seems to include photography as an important dimension of his growth and development as an artist.
What Hockney has been able to do is to move away from the single point in time – “When is the present? When did the past end and the present occur, and when does the future start? Ordinary photography has one way of seeing only, which is fixed, as if there is kind of an objective reality, which simply cannot be. Picasso…knew that every time you look there’s something different. There is so much there but we´re not seeing it, that’s the problem. – David Hockney
The installation above uses photography but in Hockney’s way.
John Berger led us into the worlds of seeing, particularly in art. David Hockney, through his practical exploration of ways of seeing takes us into new realms and perspectives on art.
Let us start with John Berger, from his own utterances:
“Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.”
“Soon after we can see, we are aware that we can also be seen. The eye of the other combines with our own eye to make it fully credible that we are part of the visible world.”
“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight. “
“The invention of the camera changed the way men saw. The visible came to mean something different to them. This was immediately reflected in painting.”
These and other quotes are from his book “Ways of seeing”.
All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this – as in other ways – they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. (John Berger)Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
“What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.”
and from his ground – breaking, Bafta award-winning series:
However, Hockney takes us further back, before the advent of photography, back to when artists used whatever technology was available , such as convex mirrors and prisms to get the ‘correct’ perspective on paper. Hockney’s love/hate relationship with technology, first to enhance his perspectives on seeing and then to jettison the technology so as to return to painting ensures his reverence for painting and reminding us about the limitations of such technology, particularly in photography.
He has used convex lenses, standard photography, polaroids (joiners), fax machines, iphones and ipads all to extend his own ways of seeing so as to represent these new ways in his painting.
Lets consider his polaroid ‘joiners’ :
One of Hockney’s concerns is that photography shows a moment in time whereas painting can show more than one moment in time.
He challenged his point by putting together a collage of polaroid images (in itself an instant image) and to show the passing of time (see the Bill Brandt’s different hand positions)
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Noya and Bill Brandt with self-portrait, Pembroke Studios, London, 8th May 1982
As a deeply thoughtful painter, he uses photography to explore more perspectives, which seemed to culminate in his huge collage ‘ a bigger Grand Canyon “
“A Bigger Grand Canyon” 1998 oil on 60 canvases, David Hockney
Henry Allen from the Washington Post describes the paintings:
He creates this space with hardness and softness of edge. He combs one color over another. He lightens and darkens, juxtaposing flat and glossy; using every tool in the oil-painting shop manual, it seems. It’s been a while since a famous artist painted a landscape using this much technique. Landscape painters of the 19th century used the manual, too — Thomas Moran, Frederic Church — but they used it to enlighten us with the sublimity of wild nature. Hockney provides no mist-shrouded peaks with eagles. There’s no sublimity here, unless it’s in the space between all these buttes and edges. If the sublimity is in the space itself, of course, that means it lies in the parts of the painting where there isn’t anything at all. How unsettling.
Photography can unsettle, but the beauty of the paintings and how they are put together ensures that we have to keep looking and exploring as if we were there , looking in different directions at once.
Henry Allen describes how Hockney explored through polaroid and again move to his love of painting to ‘improve’ on his earlier artistic and cognitive explorations:
In 1982, Hockney stood in front of this same view with a camera, about an hour after dawn. Over the next 30 minutes, he took 60 color photographs, moving his camera along one shot at a time, trying to match the edges of each picture by memory, six rows of photographs that each captured one-sixtieth of the view.
Over the years, he kept reassembling them in collages, until, last year for a show in Cologne, he blew them up large enough to make an 18-foot picture. It didn’t work.
“The moment I saw it, I realized you didn’t feel it across the room,” he says. Only oil color would have the impact he wanted.
He set out to paint 60 canvases that would blend the photographs together, crank up the color, and retain the collage oddity that made the picture possible: 60-point perspective, one point for each panel.
Which is to say: Instead of looking toward one vanishing point, you’re looking at 60, staring at a picture that goes off in 60 slightly different directions at once.
and finally a description on how this evolved:
Across the hall are drawings that lay out the painting in parts and whole; also, two of the photo-collages. After you see the painting, the collages have all the vibrancy of a sun-faded magazine cover. In their jagged immediacy and busyness, though, they recall the thrill of the first Hockney photo-collages you saw years ago, a thrill that was partly the hope that progress in the arts wasn’t entirely dead, that one thing could still lead to another.
Then you look back across the hall at this tour de force fireworks finale, optical illusion, catechism of 20th-century isms and 24-foot parade float commemorating the history of oil painting and and you realize that the collages did lead to something: a painting that takes us all the way back to the Big Bang beginning.
Perhaps Hockney should have the last word:
Photography can’t lead us to a new way of seeing. It may have other possibilities, but only painting can extend the way of seeing.
David Hockney has used photography brilliantly to explore concepts of space and time, but still comes back to his core idea that photography is quite limited by the ‘tyranny of the rectangle’ , the ‘single viewpoint’ and the ‘one moment in time’ .
Let’s explore a little on the ‘one moment in time ‘ idea. He worked on this using his ‘joiners’,once again.
Consider this image of Bill and Noya Brandt (1982) :
Hockney has been able to challenge the ‘one moment’ by piecing together several moments -we know Bill has only two hands yet we we see several hands in different positions and the two subjects are watching how this series of images is being put together. It even shows a polaroid image mid way through processing.
Through Hockney’s study of the Grand Canyon, both through photography and painting he tried to challenge our view on space and perspective.
Hockney wanted ‘to photograph the unphotographable. Which is to say, space … There 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’.
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The Grand Canyon looking North, September 1982
‘when you put one piece of paper on top of another… you put two pieces of time together, [and] therefore make a space. I thought I was making time, then you realise you’re making space… Then you realise time and space are the same thing.’
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The Grand Canyon with my Shadow
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Through painting, much later (1998)
Canvas study of the Grand Canyon 1998
‘You can peer into it for an awful long time. And you look all over. I mean, it is the one place …
…….where you become very aware of how you move your head, your eyes, everything.
**
A bigger Grand Canyon
And the colours ?-
‘If you want very strong colour, first of all you have to put it on reasonably thin … and build it up in layers. But I wanted the colour to stay there so you have to put it on in a certain way to build it up rather slowly … let the white of the canvas into it to get the glow. You don’t put white paint in colour that would make it somewhat chalky”
It is interesting to note that not only the idea of overlapping images and building up layers of colour makes links to both his photography and painting – it is in the range of vibrant and imaginative colours that starts to separate the process of photography and painting -although these days use of ‘photoshop’ morphs the two once more.
The link with his ‘joiners’ is through the putting together of 60 smaller canvasses to make up the big painting.
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What is Hockney’s views on the relationship between photography and painting?
Is photography dead?
Hockney is challenging the ‘tyranny of the rectangle‘ as well as perspective, space and time.
He tries to provide different perspectives and time on the same surface -is he more successful using paint?
Has photography given him new insights into his painting – such as his studies on the Grand Canyon?
Can you ‘move around a scene‘ in photography?
Has photography huge limitations by often being ‘one point in time?
Would a camera have recorded this scene differently? If so, what is the difference?
David Hockney has been exploring the relationship between painting and photography…
I’ve finally figured out what’s wrong with photography. It’s a one-eyed man looking through a little ‘ole. Now, how much reality can there be in that? – David Hockney
There is nothing wrong with photography, if you don’t mind the perspective of a paralysed Cyclops. – David Hockney
One of the things I’m doing in Yorkshire is finding out how difficult it is to learn not to see like cameras, which has had such an effect on us. The camera sees everything at once. We don’t. There’s a hierarchy. Why do I pick out that thing as opposed to that thing or that thing? – David Hockney
Without images how would I know what you see? I don’t know what you see. I’ll never know, but these flat images are the only things that connect up between us. – David Hockney
I made a photograph of a garden in Kyoto, the Zen garden, which is a rectangle. But a photograph taken from any one point will not show, well it shows a rectangle, but not with ninety degree angles.
Zen Garden
But slowly I began to use cameras and then think about what it was that was going on. It took me a long time, I mean I actually played with cameras and photography for about 20 years.
David Hockney
But the moment you use an ordinary camera, you are not seeing the picture, remember, meaning, you had to remember what you’ve taken. Now you could see it of course, with a digital thing, but remember in 1982 you couldn’t.
David Hockney
Pre-historic museum
Perhaps ‘seeing’ is important for all artists whether using painting or photography as a medium of recording and expressing…
When is the present? When did the past end and the present occur, and when does the future start? Ordinary photography has one way of seeing only, which is fixed, as if there is kind of an objective reality, which simply cannot be. Picasso…knew that every time you look there’s something different. There is so much there but we´re not seeing it, that’s the problem. –David Hockney
Television is becoming a collage – there are so many channels that you move through them making a collage yourself. In that sense, everyone sees something a bit different.
David Hockney
Now that is something worth thinking about – everyone sees something different….
You had to be aware that I saw that photography was a mere episode in the history of the optical projection and when the chemicals ended, meaning the picture was fixed by chemicals, we were in a new era.
David Hockney
It adds fuel to his belief that painting can do things photography can’t, even when it comes to telling the truth about war. Everyone used to assume photographs of war were “true” in a way photography can’t be. But Hockney argues that the digital age has made such a conception of photography obsolete. You can change any image now in any way you want. He once saw what a famous LA photographer’s portrait of Elton John looked like before it was retouched. The difference, he says, was “hilarious”. And now everyone can do this.
“My sister, who is just a bit older than me, she’s a retired district nurse, she’s just gone mad with the digital camera and computer – move anything about; she doesn’t worry about whether it’s authentic or stuff like that – she’s just making pictures.”
Although Hockney may disparage the simplicity of taking photos he should admit that since Niepce in early 182o’s brought photography into reality that photography has influenced painting and equally painting influenced the range of possibilities within photographic art.
Niepce 1826 -view from his window (8 hour exposure)
jfkturner in his blog ‘The Delights of Seeing‘ (Photorealism and the Relationship Between Photography and Painting) explores the close but turbulent rapport between photography and painting.
He writes:
The invention of a device that could allow anybody to record the world in perfect detail would revolutionize how we see ourselves, how we communicate and how we make art. Without Photography Modern art, film and the Internet would not exist – or at least not as we know them.
In my opinion the announcement of a device that could capture the world in perfect detail forced painters to question the nature of painting, ask what an image was and what the nature of art is. As a result paintings changed – creating images that could not be created by a camera. Eventually artists questioned the act of painting and many moved towards other ways of working – for example performance and conceptual art.
and then a last quote from Hockney himself:
He argued that for the past 500 years, artists in the West have used optics and lenses in their work, thereby presenting the world in photographic terms. The invention of photography as we know it, says Hockney, was only the invention of chemicals; the optical lens has been around for hundreds of years. The “invention of photography,” he tells me, “was the invention of the fixative to fix an image.”
Hockney seems to have an antipathy to this “chemical” photography, which he claims has assumed visual control, which equals power. “If you think of it, until the 19th century, one of the main purveyors of images was the church,” he says. “They decided that Christianity needed images, so they provided images, and in doing so the church had social control for a long time. But in the 19th century, they began to lose that control.”
“With the invention of photography, the power for social control simply moved with the image makers to what we call the media. Social control in the 20th century came through the media. That’s now disintegrating, and in a way the power of the media is therefore being diminished, and it’s spreading to anyone who wants it.”
“We’ve gotten to the point where we think the camera can capture anything at all,” “Well, it can’t really. The camera can’t compete with painting at all. The paintings are much more vivid about the place than photographs are.”
What do you think? Has photography influenced painting?
David Hockney is a great painter,but he has also known fame through photography, although he does not mince his words when he says ‘Photography will never equal painting!’
Perhaps this is the wrong argument as they are different media and needn’t be compared.
However he does make judgemental comments about photography such as ‘Photography is only good for mechanical reproduction’. ‘Photography can’t show time’ and more… I’ve seen professional photographers shoot hundreds of pictures but they are all basically the same. They are hoping that in one fraction of a second something will make that face look as if there were a longer moment…If you take a hundred, surely one will be good. It could be anybody doing it…There are few good photographs, and those good ones that do exist are almost accidental.Photography has failed…How many truly memorable pictures are there? Considering the milllions of photographs taken, there are few memorable images in this medium, which should tell us something.Photography can’t lead us to a new way of seeing. It may have other possibilities but only painting can extend the way of seeing.
Perhaps Hockney has not succeeded with one image but his photo collages and photo montages – ‘Joiners’ = certainly caught the eye of the public in the 1980’s.
Hockney’s creation of the “joiners” occurred accidentally. He noticed in the late sixties that photographers were using cameras with wide-angle lenses to take pictures. He did not like such photographs because they always came out somewhat distorted. He was working on a painting of a living room and terrace in Los Angeles. He took Polaroid shots of the living room and glued them together, not intending for them to be a composition on their own. Upon looking at the final composition, he realized it created a narrative, as if the viewer was moving through the room. He began to work more and more with photography after this discovery and even stopped painting for a period of time to exclusively pursue this new style of photography. (ref Guardian) From 1982 Hockney explored the use of the camera, making composite images of Polaroid photographs arranged in a rectangular grid. Later he used regular 35-millimetre prints to create photo collages, compiling a ‘complete’ picture from a series of individually photographed details.
The main obstacle Hockney thinks he has overcome is the limited perspective of a stationary camera. A single photograph can only show one point of view, usually for a small period of time. “All photographs share the same flaw,” he says. “Lack of time.” He then goes on to trace photography’s misguided view back hundreds of years to the Renaissance and invention of the Camera Obscura.
Cubism helped to topple the single perspective in the hand-arts, but with photography it still exists. The idea behind Hockney’s grids was to inject multiple reference points into photography, in short to make it cubist.
With a new exhibition of Hockney’s work in the Royal Academy -A Bigger Picture which focuses more on his painting, for obvious reasons it is worth looking at his ‘inferior’ artwork of photography:
And the very well known ‘Pearl Bllossom Highway”
and for more on this one..
A portrait of Hockney’s early art dealer friend John Kasmin..
and for a change, one in black and white…
More exploration of composition..
and a portrait of friend, artist and art dealer Nick Wilder