Yesterday my OH and I visited the David Hockey exhibition “A Bigger Picture” at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. We don’t often go gallery visiting but I had read about this exhibition and heard so many great things about it that it seemed only natural to go, especially as trees figure so largely in the subject matter. So this is a post about trees, but through the eyes of a master.
I am not an art critic and don’t care to comment on where Hockney will sit in the pantheon of artistic greats when history writes that judgement, but I can say what I saw and felt. And my purpose for keeping this blog is to explain how the world appears through my eyes.
First impressions were that it was aptly named. It was a huge exhibition, representing a vast body of recent work and many of the paintings are very large as well, and impress by their size alone. But it is not just the size, or the number of works hanging that impress, but the colour! Colour that was stunningly, vividly, eye- poppingly striking in an exuberant outpouring of joy. I don’t think I will ever paint another shadow in grey after seeing this. Having said that, the charcoal studies made on location were magnificent in their use of tonality, their mastery of perspective and their descriptive marks that reminded me of Van Gogh. It was these sketches that he used as the basis of the studio paintings, these and imagination.
But if the scale and the colour impressed, what engaged? The notion of series painting; subjects returned to over and over again, themes explored under different seasonal conditions, places revisited. I loved the Woldgate Woods series, seven paintings each made up from six canvases, of a year in the life of Woldgate woods. I found a website, the Chicago Arts club, where they are shown on a single webpage here.
I was enthralled by his depiction of landscape. As a walker, I love the lanes, tracks, fields and hills of England and Hockney paints the England I know and love, recording places on his canvases I have seen in replica across many counties. I don’t mean just the appearance of place, but the spirit of place.
Best of all, and the quality that captivated me most, was his depiction of light on landscape. I have seen days such as he paints, for instance, when the mist of an early morning gives way to sunshine, but I have never seen that transition captured so elegantly on a canvas before. In the room where the Tunnels series is hung, by positioning yourself near the middle of the room, it is possible to see each picture and observe how he captures the difference between April light and June light and immediately know which is which.
There are many paintings-too many perhaps for one viewing, and not all appealed to me, but those where the light was distilled to its perfect essence were moving beyond words. Go and find your own favourite! The exhibition is on until April 9th.
