The eye, the heart and the hand

Three things are necessary to make a successful painting according to 

the artist David Hockney,

” the eye, the heart and the hand, two simply won’t do" 

and this is very evident in the latest staging of his works by the Royal Academy in the major exhibition, 

“David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture”. 

This must see show is now drawing to a close and has received a hotchpotch of reviews  but none can deny the crowds of people, myself included, roaming the galleries with nods of approval and pleasure. This is one exhibition the RA should think seriously about extending as its popularity demands a second visit.

I must admit I am a tiny bit biased as I have always admired Hockney’s work and his approach to painting. However I can see in that returning to the traditional genre of landscape, Hockney faces criticism, with comments of succumbing to hubris, being passé, even gimmicky and stamping on ‘modernism’ which I expect comes from the claim that painting is a dead art!  No it is very much alive and kicking especially in the hand, eye and heart of David Hockney!

If you take a moment to step away from the hype, you come to realize the content and methodology of Hockney’s artworks is all about the practicalities of picture making, the problems of depiction and the thrill of thinking things out.

Nature in all its grandeur isn’t an easy subject to capture but Hockney’s pictures reveal that the artist was up to the challenge and the exhibition shows the passionate investigation into landscape with the ever-changing scenery and light of his native Yorkshire countryside.                                                 

Why revisit a subject that many artists of the past have tackled and produced great masterpieces from?

The answer I feel is that Hockney has thought about how we see our surroundings and has taken his pictures to a scale that makes us visually move around a multitude of canvases to see a ‘bigger picture’. In essence he has tried to recreate how the eye sees making the viewer move through his works. Hockney wants us to question that fixed point perspective that our eyes have become accustomed to, the photographic image.

Today we are smothered with images and really do not question them but Hockney has spent a life time questioning image representation, both artistically and photographically. His quest does appear to have been long and complicated but it has enabled Hockney to examine the nuances of space, scale and colour, searching for that elusive key of depicting reality of vision in a more vivid way as a two-dimensional representation.

The intriguing question is how do you bring that eye, the hand and the heart together upon a canvas?

Look harder, look longer is Hockney’s message, examine your reactions, sensations and memory, which is exactly what Hockney has done but as an artist his hand has translated his eye and heart into painted images. The catalogue of artwork reveals for me a process of observing, questioning and finding solutions to bring the three factors together. Hockney, the craftsman makes it look effortless, but you can’t help notice the energy, enthusiasm and commitment of his search for representational answers within the pictorial space.

All artists have faced at some stage the age old query of how to capture the infinity of nature with its multitude of colours, shadows, textures and complexity? Why is Hockney so different from past landscape painters? 

He embraces all media and technologies. There is no doubt that Hockney benefits like all artists from the diverse array of superior media and colours available today. The sheer brilliance of colour is something which is very immediate in the exhibition. Computer-aided construction has helped the artist cope with the scale of paintings and experimentation with video cameras has aided Hockney to interpret further the ‘Cyclops’ photographic view, but surprisingly, it is a newer technology which solved the issue of capturing nature’s transience. Faster than watercolour, the iPad has enabled Hockney to sketch more speedily in the unpredictable outdoors, capturing light and colour at the touch of the hand. Monet would have been envious!

Seemingly the hand has many tools and the eye can look closer and further, what of the heart? Hockey’s underlying sentiment is that we see with memory, individual and different, influencing how we see, revealing our bias or prejudice. Time effects memory, in turn shaping vision and Hockney’s vision is now very public, so is he making us all aware of that old idiom “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. I feel he is simply saying look closer at your surroundings, beauty is there but it is up to you to see it. Hockney’s landscapes resonate to this outlook, his eye, heart and hand working together and in my view successfully creating an impressive portfolio of paintings. Thank you David Hockney for the journey through your landscapes, it was a pictorial thrill!                 © MRMansell

David Hockney: A Bigger Picture  Thames & Hudson, 2012

(Available through Amazon at a reasonable price)

Next Dates for the Exhibition

Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao    

14 May - 30 September 2012

Museum Ludwig, Cologne       

27 October 2012 - 4 February 2013