Legacy 11- Hockney

Hockney’s rural visions

Mar 30, '12 11:34 AM for everyone

Fine spring weather made it feel particularly appropriate to go to the Royal Academy for their latest blockbuster show of landscape art by David Hockney.   This has been packing them in.  Indeed my heart sank when I arrived at the RA; there was a queue snaking across the courtyard and I’ve never seen the entry area and staircase quite as busy.  I had my ticket (though as a Friend of the RA I did slightly resent having to book a time slot weeks in advance even if the ticket was free- one of the nice things about being a Friend usually is that you can pop in on a whim without having to do advance planning) but past experience has taught me to dread very popular shows, where you can spend ages trying to get a proper look at works on display, crammed alongside others in the same situation.

I needn’t have worried.  For one thing, many of Hockney’s paintings are so huge that you have to stand well back to appreciate them.  For another, it emerged that the artist had created many of the works with specific spaces in the RA in mind after he’d been invited to do a show there.  Obviously he had though a good deal about sight lines in the process.  I wonder how this will work when the show goes on the road to Bilbao and Cologne but it’s a bonus for the RA version.

Although the show looks back over Hockney’s fluctuating engagement with landscape painting, stretching right back to his Art College days and including paintings and collages from his Southern California period, the bulk of the exhibition is concerned with works done in the years since his centre of gravity shifted back to England- more specifically to East Yorkshire- and many of the works have been created in the past two to three years.  

At the heart of the show lie a series of closely observed depictions of specific places painted over time.  In some cases this involves Monet-like groups of paintings which capture the same place from more or less the same viewpoint on different days round the year- though sometimes even paintings done within a few days of each other show significant shifts in the quality of light and the atmosphere.   In others he circles round a particular point- the stump of a recently felled tree for instance- and records both the shifting seasons and the changing marks of human activity as the felled timber is stacked and then removed.   The biggest gallery in the RA hosts a cycle of over fifty small (at least by Hockney standard) paintings depicting almost day by day the shift in the seasons from winter into spring 2011 in the woods of Woldgate, culminating in a huge canvas which shows them alive with the colours of spring.

Hockney’s landscape isn’t ostentatiously “scenic”.  It’s “normal” countryside, farmed and subject to human intervention, the woods relatively small scale and almost domestic- this is not the great Teutonic Ur-Wald.   It’s also curiously uninhabited.   Though signs of human presence are common- motor vehicles can be seen on the roads, what looks like an advertisement for a horse show is pinned on a tree trunk and someone must be farming the fields and cutting the trees- it’s also a curiously empty landscape.  There isn’t a single human being in any of the paintings (apart from a separate series which interacts with a 17^th century work by Claude).   Come to that, there doesn’t seem to be much animal life present- no cattle or sheep in the fields (which may reflect East Yorkshire’s rural economy perfectly- it’s not an area I know) and little evidence for animals or birds in the woods.   It feels a very quiet countryside for all its colour; Hockney, it seems, is a plants and flowers person rather than an animals person.   It’s also intriguing that, though Hockney has said that part of the attraction of East Yorkshire is that it isn’t “on the way to anywhere”, roads and paths figure prominently as organising features for structuring the paintings.   And of course the colours are distinctly heightened- the greens and browns, purples and reds far more intense than they could ever be in real life.  These are woodlands and fields which have a hint of magical realism about them- a sense underlined by the slightly stagey feel of some of the bigger canvases.  Hockney has been stage designer for theatre and opera and it shows; the massive picture which forms the end of the “Spring in Woldgate” cycle could easily serve as a set for a production of “The Rite of Spring”.

Given Hockney’s long running engagement with technology, whether his love/hate relationship with photography ,his fascination with the artistic uses of devices like colour fax machines or his involvement in art historical debates to argue that great artists of the past made regular use of apparatus like the camera obscura , it comes as little surprise that technology figures prominently in the show.   Sometimes this is very obvious, as in the side room showing a series of videos shot under his supervision.  Most of these involved a Land Rover kitted out with nine video cameras set up in a grid formation; the vehicle crawled along the road at about 5mph filming the woods.  The results are rather hypnotic, especially when the camera were set so that the framing doesn’t quite “run on” and there are slight continuity gaps with, say, a tree trunk moving out of one frame but only appearing in the next with a second or two’s delay.   Hockney’s Californian landscapes reflect a very Futurist interest in the visual distortions achieved by looking out of a moving vehicle; these videos take the process a stage further by playing this effect out in real time and with moving pictures.  FT Marinetti would probably have approved, though he would no doubt have wanted the Land Rover to move a great deal faster!

Less immediately obvious but equally important is the substantial role I-Pad and I-Phone in the creative process, used as sketching aids and in more substantive ways to form the basis of some of the pictures.  In practice this means that the artist needs a  back up team to help process and manipulate the images he creates- there is something reassuringly medieval about the notion of the artist as head of a collaborative workshop rather than the individual genius of Romantic mythology.  

So what about the art?   Basically I enjoyed the exhibition- and not just because I once met Hockney at a gallery private view some years ago (though “met” rather overstates our level of interaction).   As a matter of personal taste I tend to respond most strongly to the pictures painted in autumn and winter- perhaps that says something about my preferences when it comes to the seasons and my fondness for autumn colours and the clear light of sunny winter days (see the picture at the top for an example).    Perhaps Hockney feels the same way- certainly he seems to have done a lot of his painting in the woods during those seasons even though he apparently feels the cold badly (I can sympathise- my legs sometimes get cold in winter as well even though I’m nothing like as tall as he is).    Not everything works.  There’s a fine line between vibrancy and garish when it comes to colours and there are times when I feel he ends up on the wrong side- purples just a bit too purple, greens a shade too lush.   And there’s one room in the show which I found downright scary.  This contains a series of pictures depicting the sudden surge of spring in the form of masses and masses of white hawthorn blossom in the hedgerows.   Hockney clearly finds this event profoundly inspiring but the paintings he has created to celebrate it are deeply scary- see below, with its unearthly colours and ominous, alien shapes.  There’s a definite sense of the Day of the Triffids here.   Back in the woods, though, there’s a comforting sense of rootedness and durability, something at once mundane and deeply impressive.  I just hope that Hockney’s woods don’t end up swamped by  artistic tourists looking to explore “Hockney Country”.