Three Trees Near Thixendale - Summer 2007
David Hockney's massively successful show (A Bigger Picture) at the Royal Academy is devoted entirely to the genre of landscapes. After his fantastically successful Bigger Trees near Warter (an enormous landscape covering 50 canvases and now bought by the Tate, the RA offered Hockney the full complement of main galleries for a show of his new landscapes. The resulting exhibition contains more than 150 works, mostly created within the past decade.
A lot of them were painted outdoors around Bridlington, the small Yorkshire seaside town where Hockney has lived for seven years "on location" as he beautifully put it in The Culture Show with Andrew Marr. There are bright oil paintings of wheat fields and tree-lined country lanes, multi-canvas vistas of woodland seen throughout the seasons. There are watercolours of hedgerows and haystacks, as well as one of my favourites - a suburban landscape and more than 50 painterly “drawings”, created using an iPad and then printed on to what I imagine must be special paper, documenting the onset of spring along an old Roman road that runs out of Bridlington. I wasn't so impressed with these - they were too gimmicky. He is really just painting using another medium, not really offering an alternative vision of iPad world. There is even a fascinating film split into 9 different screens of Woldgate woods captured with a moving camera. Each film running at a slightly different time, which amazingly gives a heightened sense of time and space. Very hard to describe, but wonderful to watch. But then the film switches to a collection of ballet dancers moving around a yellow floored studio, also split into diferent screens. I actually found that more enduring and interesting, but then I am an urban chick.
Hawthorne Blossom, Woldgate No.4, 2009
The strangest and most memorable pictures are more eerie and intense. There are several paintings of hawthorn blossom, which have a bizarre quality of Elizabethan topiary, clumsy applique and psychadelic shadows that are entirely surreal. They leave you feeling a little queasy, maybe that's what nature's bounty looks like through Alice's looking glass, or maybe it's Hockney pushing forwards towards the abstract to remind us that he was once considered an `enfant terrible'. Quite an easy factor to forget when looking around at the other incredibly well behaved green and pleasant lands. These paintings are nightmarish, claustraphonbic, like nature out of control - a cancerous gene. I wonder if he has suffered with it.
The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (Twenty-Eleven)
The show-stopping, iconic and much publicized painting `The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorks in 2011 (TwentyEleven)' took my breath away. When masterpieces arrive in the world they have a quality of familiarity about them, like they have already been in existance for decades. This painting does exactly that and its no wonder it was chosen to represent the show on the cover of the catalogue, the cover of the Royal Academy magazine and all the publicity surrounding this amazing show.
I was left feeling an odd combination of ecstatic and sad. This is a show full of wonder and appreciation for the poetry of the British landscape, but I was also left with the overwhelming feeling that this is a last push for our Hockers - a rather panicky depiction of his mortality.
I was left feeling an odd combination of ecstatic and sad. This is a show full of wonder and appreciation for the poetry of the British landscape, but I was also left with the overwhelming feeling that this is a last push for our Hockers - a rather panicky depiction of his mortality.
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