Hockney Exhibition Visit

David Hockney Exhibition – 24 February 2012 (and return visit 14/3)

My notes from the visits along with further research:

Thixendale Trees - series of four composite paintings (8 canvases each) of a stand of trees, fields and background hills painted from memory – loose brushstrokes with spots of colour.  I felt summer and winter had the most impact – winter was my favourite with the bare branches, blue hills and yellow/ochre ploughed field.  The strong blocks of colour here for the landscape set off the trees very well and the very pale blue/grey sky provides the perfect foil to set off the smaller branches and shapes of the individual trees.

Charcoal drawings – Autumn Thixendale – this is a series of four drawings done only a couple of weeks apart in October.  The first (18^th) shows trees with plenty of foliage – the artist has used swirling charcoal strokes for the main bulk of the trees and dots and fine lines for the highest branches.  The last (28^th) has a completely different feel to it – the trees are much more open with a clearer sense of their structure, and even the foliage underneath is diminished.  You always get a couple of weeks in Autumn when there are some high winds or storms and all the trees seem to go bare almost immediately – this really shows how doing a series of drawings/paintings of the same scene can alter on a daily basis.  Hockney has said that he really noticed the changing seasons when he returned to the UK from California and I think this is what he was depicting here.

Road to York through Sledmere – riot of colour – purple shadows, red houses and walls – enhanced/unreal colours.  Scale and perspective altered – houses in bottom left of painting and telephone box seem to a different scale to rest of painting – varying textures using brushstrokes and dots on the roofs to differentiate.  Really liked this painting, you can tell it’s a British landscape because of the terraced houses and red telephone box, but otherwise the colours are very tropical.  The houses are possibly built with red brick and have red tiled roofs and Hockney has chosen to accentuate these colours, contrasting them with the bright greens of hedges and trees.  The colours give a feeling of heat (unusual in the North!!) as well as the deep, crisp purple shadows falling on the road.

The theme of a winding road or track is explored in most of the paintings in this exhibition – I watched the Hockney programme on BBC2 and he stated that he started exploring this topic whilst working in California and the winding roads he used to drive to his studio.

One of my favourites although not a new work – Salt Mills 1997 – absolutely loved the colour in this: bright yellow-orange mill building dominates the painting with rows of “stretched” and elongated terraced houses with a purple-pink light on the roofs.  Very textured areas used to depict railway lines and almost abstract bridge as if viewed for a different perspective – blocks of colour for bricks, pointillist colour effects in places.  Very strong complementary colours used in this painting – the dominant hues are the orange of the mill buildings and the purple on the houses and parts around the mill.  Complementaries are again used in the centre of the painting – the red train and line against the deep green of the landscaped area in the middle.  The second time I viewed this painting, I had the room to myself (10 o’clock ticket!) and only this time did I notice there is what appears to be a figure in the centre of the painting – just behind the first row of houses – which appears to be wearing a flat cap – self-portrait perhaps?

Midsummer East Yorkshire – 36 watercolour paintings – in depth studies of an area – ordinary streets and fields painted.  Also in same room and same subject matter – oil paintings of Yorkshire in the summer from observation – lots of oranges, yellows and greens with complementary purples used for roads and shadows.  I felt the quality of the paintings here was very variable – many were very sketchy and quite basic, but what created the impact was the layout and the sheer volume of work.  Because they were all closely hung on one wall (watercolours on one, oils on the other) you really had to step back away from the wall to view them.  This, of course, means that you are not looking at any one painting too closely but getting an overall impression of the theme of “summer in Yorkshire” and in this respect this series works.  I don’t think many would stand up as individual paintings but, as a type of sketchbook series as observational works, they do capture the essence of a British rural summer.

Tunnel series x 5 – the same scene of a farm track though trees and fields captures the landscape in the different seasons – I found Late Spring and July really encapsulated the British summer and the lushness and abundance of hedgerows – a riot of greens and yellows (again with purple for shadows).  Again, the artist has concentrated on the colours and feel of the view, rather than the detail of each plant.  I think the “Early July Tunnel”, for me, works best because it is much more closed in that the others – the height of the foliage on each side almost obliterates the wider view, leaving just the blues and greens of high summer.

Woldgate woods – again a series of 7 paintings made up of 6 canvasses each.  I wasn’t particularly impressed with these – they were probably the most basic works – very loosely applied and sketchy.  Also on display were charcoal drawings of the same area – they almost reminded me of Van Gogh drawings – very distinctive mark-making: strong lines and heavy shading, curled lines to depict foliage and eraser used to good effect for trunks and branches.  I found the drawings here much more interesting than the paintings (which was probably a good thing as many people were not looking at the drawings which gave more time to study them!).

Hawthorns series - both charcoal drawings and large-scale paintings.  The largest one in this series (May Blossom on the Roman Road) reminded me very much of impressionist/port-impressionist skies – swirling patterns created by broken colour with clear brushstrokes of bright pink and bright blue.  The sense of depth and scale in this painting is created by a contrasting bright orange path sweeping round into the distance and the diminishing scale of the large sweep of white and cream flowers by the roadside.

All the hedges in the series are abstracted by varying degrees into stylised, simplified forms with dots and strokes of the brush to show blossom and tonal variations.  Some very abstracted forms in these paintings – blossom depicted as large oval forms or even clumped together to make abstract swirls – branches coming out of the tops of bushes look like waving tentacles (or even alien-like!).  Bright greens, creams and yellows used for sunlit scenes with heavy dark blues purples and pinks used for dark tones under trees/bushes and shadows.  The shadows on the roads and paths again abstracted and do not correspond to the object causing the shadow!  Shadow forms reminded me of the cacti you used to see in American Westerns.  Had a bash at copying one these on my ipad (brushes) which was quite good fun and, as the gallery was very busy, lots of people were interested in what I was doing!  Had a very nice lady chat to me about the brushes app – obviously Hockney is one of the artists most prominent in this new field of digital art – so I spent a little time explaining to her how it worked and how easy it was to create colours and textures very quickly, almost like having the biggest colour palette to hand at all times. 

Winter Timber series.  The standout painting here is the 9’ x 20’ “Winter Timber - the dominant element again is colour: it is so vivid: the orange cut logs forming the main sweep up the centre of the painting, leading the eye to the swirling vortex of blue trees and the horizon; shades of purple used for the forest floor, tracks of ‘V’s used to show the working vehicles of the forest and heading down the path in the distance; the pink/purple tree stump; the distant red (bare earth?) field against the green carpet of the floor (which also has complementary red in it) and the cerulean blue stripes of trees.  When you think that the actual colours here at the time of year depicted in the painting would be extremely muted and dull (grey skies, low light levels, brown/grey trees, brown earth) Hockney has really gone to town with his imagination! 

Part of the Winter Timber series was four charcoal drawings of the area which were very sensitively done and much more detailed than the paintings.  Cut Trees – Timber, and Timber Gone (both 2008) are of the same view and it is very interesting to compare how the artist approach the scene on different occasions and how just changing small details can change the whole feel of a drawing.  In the first drawing, the focus is on the cut wood, and the area immediately surrounding it.  Once that focus has gone, the artist then concentrates the detail in other areas of the drawing – the trees/shrubs on the far right are much more detailed, as are the stand of trees to the left – by pulling out the trunks with an eraser, he has changed the focal point from the central foreground (Timber) to the area immediately surrounding the “emptiness” where the timber had been in Timber Gone.

One thing I did find particularly interesting was the videos (not normally a fan of installations!) – a bank of cameras was fixed to the top of a jeep and driven round, focusing on a hedgerow and a track in woods through the seasons.  Although the video is, in effect, a film of one area, the splitting of the viewpoint (by the use of cameras and the intersecting black lines) and the slightly different angles stops you focusing on just one area – it makes you view each area as a different (and complete) view in its own right.  The one which was most effective I felt was the view down the lane in winter with snow on the ground.  I think the lack of colour in this view leads you to focus more on the individual shapes of the trees and branches. 

After viewing the videos, it led me to think a bit more about all the paintings that were composed of varying numbers of canvasses.  I am assuming that Hockney used multiple canvasses for ease of working/transporting, etc, but it seems that doing this has caused him to think about split viewpoints, and so the videos were created (as the videos were done after the paintings).

Arrival of Spring – 51 prints of ipad drawings plus one large scale oil painting.  These were actually designed to fill the space of the room they were to be exhibited in.  The drawings date from January to the end of May 2011 and each one is titled the day on which it was done.  Obviously being computer generated, these have a different, graphic/illustration feel to them but I can see his logic in using the ipad app for this series – especially the winter ones when it’s cold (he stated that some were done sitting in his car).  I know there has been some criticism over his use of the ipad/iphone but, it is just a tool for expression, the same as anything other medium and it is what you make of it. 

One room I didn’t see the first time round (far too busy) was his sketchbooks.  Luckily, when I returned, it was much less crowded so I had a chance to look at leisure although, as with any sketchbook exhibits, you really want to be able to browse through each page.  It was very informative to see his original sketches, and how these had been progressed to the final works and paintings: the original sketch for winter timber takes up a double page of his sketchbook in crayon and charcoal.  The colours he has drawn form the basis of the large painting – purples and browns used for the ground and tree stump and light brown/orange for the cut timber.  These brighter colours were probably used as a “near as” colour because crayons don’t usually have a wide colour range and so you are forced to simplify the colours.  What the artist has then done is to emphasis these basic colours – the purples are more purple, the cut trees are more orange, etc.

Another sketchbook that interested me was the Blossom Sketchbook.  “Blossom, May 25^th 2009: the artist has basically sketched an entire hedgerow in ink, watercolour and charcoal, but made it an exercise in mark-making – each tree is totally different to the next and he has obviously used all his tools – pens, brushes, inks, fingers – to create this line of trees.  In another sketch (which I quickly copied into my notebook – below) shows the inspiration for a number of works – the tunnel has been emphasized, and you can see where he has highlighted the different basic shapes for some blossom plants – these basic shapes, forms and patterns were repeated, and abstracted further, in the whole series of blossom paintings.

Overall I really enjoyed this exhibition – I think the exuberance, colour and sheer volume of works on a theme makes up for some of the downsides of these works:  I felt some works were repetitive and too similar to give any meaningful contrast or message.  As I said previously, a lot of other works were very sketchily done and, if being shown on their own, would not have stood out.  However, be massing the works as he has done, you see the overall view rather than the detail of each work.  I also appreciated his sketchbooks and charcoal drawings much more than many of the paintings – they are more detailed and have a lot more atmosphere than some of the paintings – perhaps he felt he had to make some of the paintings purely to fill the space provided?  But, everyone coming out of the exhibition seemed happy – the bright, dynamic colours used seemed to lift spirits (perhaps what was intended in an English winter).