lessons learned from hockney
THINK BIG In A Closer Winter Tunnel, February –
March, his six-canvas study of vanishing, linear perspective, Hockney recalls Hobbema’s The Avenue at Middelharnis. But working with more than one canvas can be problematic. You may take two or three easels out with you, yes, but which panel to
paint fi rst? Which to complete fi rst? Think, like Hockney, about working on them all simultaneously, as if the lot is one giant canvas. Move canvas to canvas, feeling your way around the whole. One trick Hockney borrows from Vermeer
involves working with different lenses to bring minutiae detail closer for inspection.
You could also try focusing your camera on the middle ground, to bring detail up to the surface on reference images. In addition, think about the overall compositional design: try working up from the foreground through to the background, lower central upwards, as in Hockney’s Woldgate Woods, 21, 23 & 29 November.
him from Monet is that the Frenchman was looking at nature under different weather conditions, whereas Hockney, always one step ahead, looks to capture nature at its very best. When painting landscapes, try and
become as in sync with the natural world as Hockney is, mindful that spring, unlike winter and summer, is transitory and must therefore be painted with the same urgency as the Impressionists, their brushwork the result of interpreting and converting the evolution of season to season with great speed – and not much time for colour mixing.
DRAW AND REVISE Hockney is always drawing, drawing,
drawing. “Everything begins with the sketchbook,” he says, just as it should be for you. Learn from sketches how to develop compositions for your paintings. Consider the pictorial design and structure, as Hockney does, making a
preparatory sketch work under Giotto. In recent years the iPad has become a “replacement” for his sketchbook, but Hockney always carries both. His iPad drawings are great,
immediate works of art because he keeps them simple. Concentrate on recording what you see, feel and remember. The Yosemite Valley images are a series of small iPad drawings blown up on a high-quality printer and butted together to reach the dizzying height of 12 foot. Hockney secures the structure of
the landscape by re-jigging his viewpoint to match the fl at perspectives learnt from Picasso’s Cubism. It helps that he’s also re-working and re-thinking Cézanne, focusing on the main subject – the centre of interest – developing the composition all at once, bringing the whole landscape into focus.
LEARN HOW TO LOOK Like Hockney, you could take
advantage of optical aids and visual
tools, such as a camera obscura or a curved mirror. Use them to help your compositional arrangement when trying to ‘abstract’ the landscape. Don’t be afraid to work looking through a sheet of grey glass; it makes the differences in tonal values more apparent. And look at Stanley Spencer, who,
ABOVE A Closer Winter Tunnel, February – March, 2006, oil on six canvases, 182.9x365.8cm OPPOSITE PAGE, FROM TOP Nichols Canyon, 1980, acrylic on canvas, 213.4x152.4cm; The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011, iPad drawing printed on paper, 144.1x108cm
like Hockney, thought the English ground was his ‘private heaven’ to be captured under an explosion of animated mark and colour. Hockney teaches us to really look;
that what you expect to see actually isn’t. For example, summer months are the darkest, not lightest, due to longer daylight hours blocking out huge expanses of what you see under dark long shadows. All in all, A Bigger Picture, helps you
see the landscape as you’ve never seen it before, before you go painting your own. Enjoy... and learn! David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture runs until 9 April at the Royal Academy of Arts, London W1.
www.royalacademy.org.uk
Artists & Illustrators 73
© DAVID HOCKNEY / COLLECTION OF ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES, SYDNEY. PHOTO CREDIT: RICHARD SCHMIDT
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84