DAVID HOCKNEY RA A BIGGER PICTURE Royal Academy, London until 9 April 2012
The posters for A Bigger Picture in the Royal Academy courtyard show Hockney painting, his back to the viewer, in a pose almost identical to that in which Joshua Reynolds gazes out from his pedestal over the queues waiting to get in to this heavily promoted, some would say over-hyped, and crowded exhibition. Hockney is now hailed as our greatest living painter, stepping into the shoes vacated by the late Lucien Freud. What ever drove Hockney, now 74, to fill Burlington House with light and colour, this show is certainly a wonderful celebration, perhaps a re-discovery, of landscape painting. It is a true tour de force, if not of subject — it does help if you like trees — so much as method and technique. The tour starts with the early photocollages and red grids of the Grand Canyon but soon explodes into a huge, if a touch repetitive, range of arresting, vibrant studies of the changing seasons in East Yorkshire, most often Woldgate Woods.
David Hockney. A Closer Winter Tunnel, February–March, 2006. Oil on 6 canvases. 182 × 365 cm. Collection Art Gallery of New South Wales. Purchased with funds provided by Geoff and Vicki Ainsworth, the Florence and William Crosby Bequest, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales Foundation 2007.
Hockney works in oils and in watercolour, painting fast out of doors or, more leisurely, in the studio from sketches, and by drawing on his encyclopaedic visual memory. He was a very early adopter of the iPad — ‘a marvellous tool’ he says, which enables you to ‘get colour down even faster than with watercolour’ — and has used its painting programs to make images which are then blown up to many times the size of the screen to create works over a metre square. The last gallery of recent paintings includes four huge iPad-generated studies of Yosemite, made less than 6 months ago, which are truly awe-inspiring.
Hockney has his detractors. His old drawing master says that he has become a mere ‘decorator’; Brian Sewell excoriated the exhibition in the Evening Standard, and was particularly scathing about Hockney's re-working of Claude's The Sermon on the Mount. You'll enjoy making your mind up about Hockney at this show. There is a good audio guide, with plenty of Hockney on Hockney, which ought to be included in the high ticket prices being charged by the RA.
- © British Journal of General Practice 2012
