The day I spent with Artist David Hockney (British, born 1937)
by Jack A. Atkinson
I was working for The San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner as Art Director of the Sunday Magazine, California Living. They sent me to the IDCA (International Design Conference in Aspen). When I arrived the directors of the IDCA contacted me and said if I would like to interview David Hockney, they would set it up. So I ended up spending most of a remarkable day with the artist David Hockney one on one.
Aspen is a relaxing environment anyway. We spend the first several hours just having breakfast and coffee discussing his art and his influences. Then around noon, he asked if I wanted to go to the Aspen Art Museum with him, he had an exhibition of his paintings there.
Certainly, I replied and we drove to the museum together. We walked around the museum full of his pool paintings and he explained what he was trying to say with each work of art. At the end of the private museum tour (Hockney’s exhibition commentary by Hockney himself), he asked if I would like him to sign a book for a keepsake of the day? We picked out a book, then I asked if he could sign the book under one of his paintings, pictured inside. He looked at me with a slight grin and said,”I see what you want.” Then he signed his name across two pages instead of under one piece of art. He was very happy with himself. He had still signed “the book” without making any single page more valuable.
That is where the day ended, a huge group had gathered around the artist and all were wanting to talk to him.
With Hockney’s signed Book in hand, I took off back to the Aspen Design Conference.
A MAJOR RETROSPECTIVE AT THE MET
For nearly 60 years David Hockney has pursued a singular career with a love for painting and it’s intrinsic challenges. His new work and some of his earlier pieces are in a traveling exhibition that just closed in NYC.
A MAJOR RETROSPECTIVE just ended at The Metropolitan Museum of Art— it was the show’s only North American venue. Opening in November 2017 — it honored the artist’s 80th year, by presenting his most iconic works and the key moments of his career from 1960’s to the present. Working in a wide range of media with equal measures of wit and intelligence, Hockney, has examined, probed, and questioned how to capture the perceived world of movement, space, and time in two dimensions. The exhibition David Hockney offered a grand overview of the artist’s achievements across all media, including painting, drawing, photography, and video. From his early engagement with modernist abstraction and mid-career experiments with illusion and realism to his most recent, jewel-toned landscapes, Hockney has consistently explored the nature of perception and representation with both intellectual rigor and sheer delight in the act of looking.
Born in West Yorkshire, where he attended the local Bradford School of Art, Hockney moved to London in 1959 to study at the Royal College of Art. His career is distinguished as much by early successes as by his willingness to flaunt conventions both societal and artistic. Hockney’s works from the 1960s brazenly reference homoerotic subject matter, from Walt Whitman to Physique Pictorial muscle magazines, while his dedication to figuration throughout his career runs against the grain of predominant art world trends on both sides of the Atlantic.
Many fine examples of Hockney’s work from California in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as his double portraits from New York, London, and Los Angeles, show the artist’s interest in the tension that exists in social relationships and the difficulty of depicting transparent material such as glass and water. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Hockney turned to a brightly hued palette and fractured, cubistic perspective that mirrors both his interest in Pablo Picasso and his own experiments with Polaroid photography. In recent decades, Hockney has ventured outdoors to paint the changeable landscapes of his native Yorkshire across the seasons, while simultaneously returning to the study of figures in social groupings. Keenly interested in scientific innovations in the aid of art, Hockney recently experimented with an old technology: he created a series of portrait drawings using a camera lucida, first employed by artists in the Renaissance to render one-point perspective. He has also always embraced new technologies, including the possibilities for colorful composition offered by applications on the iPhone and iPad. Examples of the artist’s experiments in that medium were included in the galleries. The exhibition ends with his most recent, near neon-toned landscapes, painted in the last three years in Southern California, where he returned to live in 2013. The Met presentation marks the first time the series was exhibited publicly in the United States. Even to the most committed follower of Hockney’s art, the unprecedented unification of his renowned early works with the newest will be revelatory.
Below is a video that shows an overview of the exhibition. You will probably enjoy the video most if the full-screen button on the lower left is engaged for a larger view of Hockney’s artworks.
Hockney talks about his artworks in the video below.
Showcasing more than 200 works, this catalog offers a full retrospective of the artist’s remarkable six-decade career.
(Source: video and audio clips courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, text information from the Met Press offices, and photos of Hockney’s “The Arrival of Spring” paintings from the PACE gallery website, Pace Gallery, 508 West 25th Street, New York NY 10001)
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