David Hockney

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David Hockney

David Hockney - English Artist
Born David Hockney
July 9, 1937
Bradford, England
Occupation Artist, painter, printmaker
We Two Boys Together Clinging, 1961.
We Two Boys Together Clinging, 1961.

David Hockney, CH, RA, (born 9 July 1937) is an English artist, based in Los Angeles, California, United States. An important contributor to the British Pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. He settled in California during the 80's

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[edit] Early years

Hockney was born in Bradford and educated first at Wellington Primary School (then Wellington first school). He later went to Bradford Grammar School, Bradford College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, where he met R. B. Kitaj. While still a student at the Royal College of Art, Hockney was featured in the exhibition Young Contemporaries—alongside Peter Blake—that announced the arrival of British Pop Art. He became associated with the movement, but his early works also display expressionist elements, not dissimilar to certain works by Francis Bacon. Sometimes, as in We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961), named after a poem by Walt Whitman, these works make reference to his homosexuality. From 1963 Hockney was represented by the influential art dealer John Kasmin. In 1963 Hockney visited New York, making contact with Andy Warhol. Later, a visit to California, where he settled, inspired Hockney to make a series of oil paintings of swimming pools in Los Angeles. These are executed in a more realistic style and use vibrant colours. He also made prints, portraits of friends, and stage designs for the Royal Court Theatre, Glyndebourne, La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.

[edit] Infatuation with Cliff Richard

Early in his development, Hockney exhibited a distinct crush on rockstar Cliff Richard. Richard was referenced directly and indirectly in Hockney's work. Often Hockney referred to him as 'Doll Boy' after Richard's 1958 hit single Living Doll and many early works have the letters "CR" or "DB" or the numerical representation "42" where 4 represents the D and 2 stands for the B.

[edit] Works

[edit] The "joiners"

David Hockney has also worked with photography, or, more precisely, photocollage. Using varying numbers (~5-150) of small Polaroid snaps or photolab-prints of a single subject Hockney arranged a patchwork to make a composite image. Because these photos are taken from different perspectives and at slightly different times, the result is work which has an affinity with Cubism, an affinity which was one of Hockney's major aims - discussing the way human vision works. Some of these pieces are landscapes such as Pearblossom Highway #2, [1]others being portraits, e.g. Kasmin 1982,[2] and My Mother, Bolton Abbey, 1982.[3]

These photomontage works appeared mostly between 1970 and 1986. He referred to them as "joiners". He began this style of art by taking Polaroid photographs of one subject and arranging them into a grid layout. The subject would actually move while being photographed so that the piece would show the movements of the subject seen from the photographer's perspective. In later works Hockney changed his technique and moved the camera around the subject instead.

Hockney's creation of the "lergy" occurred accidentally. He noticed in the late sixties that photographers were using cameras with wide-angle lenses to take pictures. He did not like such photographs because they always came out somewhat distorted. He was working on a painting of a living room and terrace in Los Angeles. He took Polaroid shots of the living room and glued them together, not intending for them to be a composition on their own. Upon looking at the final composition, he realized it created a narrative, as if the viewer was moving through the room. He began to work more and more with photography after this discovery and even stopped painting for a period of time to exclusively pursue this new style of photography.

[edit] Later works

A Bigger Splash, 1967
A Bigger Splash, 1967

In 1974, Hockney was the subject of Jack Hazan's film, A Bigger Splash (named after one of Hockney's swimming pool paintings from 1967).

Hockney was commissioned to design the cover and a series of pages for the December 1985 issue of the French edition of Vogue magazine. Consistent with his interest in Cubism and admiration for Pablo Picasso, Hockney chose to paint Celia Birtwell (who appears in several of his works) with different views—her facial features as if the eye had scanned her face diagonally.

Another important commission of his was to draw with the Quantel Paintbox, a computer program that allowed the artist to sketch direct onto the monitor screen. This commission was taken by Hockney in December 1985. Using this program was similar to drawing on the PET film for prints which he had much experience in. His works were so successful that a video was made while he was using the Quantel and broadcast by the BBC.

A Bigger Grand Canyon, 1998, National Gallery of Australia.
A Bigger Grand Canyon, 1998, National Gallery of Australia.

His A Bigger Grand Canyon, a series of 60 paintings which combined to produce one enormous picture, was bought by the National Gallery of Australia for $4.6 million.

On 21 June 2006, his painting of The Splash fetched £2.6m - a record for a Hockney painting [3].

In October 2006 the National Portrait Gallery in London organized one of the largest ever displays of Hockney's portraiture work, including 150 of his paintings, drawings, prints, sketchbooks and photocollages from over the course of five decades. The collection consisted of his earliest self portraits up into his latest work completed in 2005. [4] The exhibition proved to be one of the most successful in the gallery's history, and Hockney himself assisted in displaying the works. The exhibition ran until January 2007.

In June 2007, Hockney's largest painting, Bigger Trees Near Warter, which measures 15 x 40 foot, was hung in the Royal Academy's largest gallery in their annual Summer Exhibition.[5] This work "is a monumental-scale view of a coppice in Hockney's native Yorkshire, between Bridlington and York. It was painted on 50 individual canvases, mostly working in situ, over five weeks last winter."[6] In 2008, he donated this work to the Tate gallery in London, saying: "I thought if I'm going to give something to the Tate I want to give them something really good. It's going to be here for a while. I don't want to give things I'm not too proud of...I thought this was a good painting because it's of England...it seems like a good thing to do."[7]

Many of Hockney's works are now housed in a converted industrial building called Salts Mill, in Saltaire, in his home town of Bradford.

[edit] The Hockney-Falco thesis

Main article: Hockney-Falco thesis

In the 2001 television programme and book, Secret Knowledge, Hockney posited that the Old Masters used camera obscura techniques, utilized with a concave mirror, which allowed the subject to be projected onto the surface of the painting, leaving the task of the painter to simply match and fill in the colors. Hockney argues that this technique migrated gradually to Italy and most of Europe, and is the reason for the photographic style of painting we see in the Renaissance and later periods of art. His theory of the use of this method in Old Master works is seen as incorrect by most optical historians and many art historians[citation needed].

[edit] Public life

A conscientious objector, Hockney worked as a medical orderly in hospitals as his National Service in the 1950s.

He was made a Companion of Honour in 1997 and is also a Royal Academician.

In September 2005 Hockney declared his opposition to the proposed UK ban on smoking in public places.

On 4th June 2008 Hockney critisized Labour's proposed new policy to ban drawings of children, despite admitting that he would probably not bother to vote in the next general election, and admitted he had only voted twice before in his life.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Image of Pearblossom Highway
  2. ^ Image of Kasmin 1982
  3. ^ Image of photocollage My Mother, Bolton Abbey, 1982
  4. ^ Meredith Etherington-Smith (August 15, 2006), A David Hockney Moment, ARTINFO, <http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/19262/a-david-hockney-moment/>. Retrieved on 17 April 2008 
  5. ^ Bigger Trees near Warter as seen in the Royal Academy, June 2007
  6. ^ Charlotte Higgins, Hockney's big gift to the Tate: a 40ft landscape of Yorkshire's winter trees, The Guardian, 8 April 2008 [1]
  7. ^ Simon Crerar, David Hockney donates Bigger Trees Near Warter to Tate, The Times, 7 April 2008 [2]

[edit] See also

[edit] External links