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Jolly Hockney pics
Woldgate Woods
WHAT a treat it is to see a master’s works while he is still alive.
So often you find yourself looking at what are regarded as great paintings and their creators are long, consigned to history.
The emotional link is broken.
Not so with the evergreen David Hockney, arguably the country’s greatest living artist.
Earlier this month the Bradford-born painter opened his one-man show at the Royal Academy of Arts, a walk away from Piccadilly Circus.
And when I say one-man, don’t be thinking of an intimate collection of a few treasured works.
This is an art show on a huge scale, filling 13 rooms.
A Bigger Picture is Hockney’s homage to the landscape, mostly British, and in particular that found in the Yorkshire Wolds near Bridlington where he now lives.
The show mostly consists of oil paintings, charcoal and iPad drawings, sketches and even films, made between 2004 and 2011.
And it’s just a magnificent, sometimes emotional, experience.
Once you’ve battled through the trophy hunters swarming around the gift shop and into Gallery 1 you’re transported back to east Yorkshire.
The hexagonal room has a quartet of huge canvases depicting three trees as they are transformed by the seasons.
Up close you can see what appear to be child-like brush strokes, with no fine blending or microscopic detailing.
But as you draw backwards the sum of the parts merge to make a far greater impression.
Trees, whether in summer’s full leaf or stripped bare by winter, are a central theme running through the show.
And the paintings’ sheer brightness – think of a television with its colour setting up too high – is so powerful that it improves your mood, almost making you laugh out loud they’re so full of joy.
Gallery 2 offers a clue as to how a lad from the monochromed industrial north found his technicolour vision.
Two paintings – Fields, Eccleshill, 1956 and Bolton Junction, Eccleshill, 1956 – made when Hockney was a teenager studying at the Bradford School of Art are swathed in a dour light.
Fast-forward past his graduation from London’s Royal College of Art (he studied there from 1959 to 1962), take in a trip to Italy, and both his horizons and his palette have begun to widen.
He set up base in Los Angeles in 1964.
There he had his first taste of fame as a young artist with his bright, simplified versions of Hollywood life including his now iconic A Bigger Splash painting of 1967.
As A Closer Grand Canyon from 1998 later illustrates, the Californian experience may also have injected fluorescent colours into Hockney’s imagination.
Optimism
This optimism is its most acute in the next series of works the now 74-year-old created while depicting his first Yorkshire landscapes.
The six works were all painted from memory in 1997/98.
Among them are his famous image of a golden Salts Mill complete with shiny brown terraced houses and an equally luscious Garrowby Hill complete with luminous green and yellow fields bordered by purple hedgerows.
What is more startling is that they were inspired as a result of daily drives to and from his friend Jonathan Silver’s deathbed in Wetherby.
This was the same Jonathan Silver who converted the crumbling Salts Mill in Saltaire into a gallery space which today showcases many of the artist’s works.
The paintings exude an optimism and joy made at what must have been a very trying time for Hockney as his close pal succumbed to cancer.
It’s this underlying sense of fascination with the natural world which runs like a rich seam throughout the show.
These are paintings created by a man who loves life.
But Hockney does not skirt the issue of death.
Through a group of paintings called Totems and Trees he examines the final cycle of nature which ends in death and decay.
In Gallery 8 the room is dominated by a psychedelic canvas of cut yellow logs laying on purple soil by a pink/brown roadside.
Hockney’s creative tendencies, and embracing of new technology, get a full airing in the huge Gallery 9 with The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011.
It records the transition from winter through to late Spring on one small road in 51 prints and one giant painting.
The prints were all created using an iPad, and have a hazy other-world quality albeit lacking the depth of the oil-based works.
But it is his 32-canvas painting, which covers an entire wall, which grabs your attention with its sharpness.
One gallery room towards the end of show is devoted to showing Hockney’s note books, sketches and iPad images.
This sneak peek into his creative process only makes what you have witnessed in the previous galleries all the more remarkable, such is the scope and sheer industry of his efforts in creating them.
On the train back, and this exhibition was definitely worth a day trip on East Coast’s Leeds to London service, I was left reflecting on a show which had left me with a sense of hope that even in your ‘winter’ years your best work may still be yet to come.
*The show runs until April 9. For details go to www.royalacademy.org.uk
*Charles Heslett travelled to London with East Coast trains. Standard Advance returns from Leeds to London, booked online at www.eastcoast.co,uk, start from £23. Times and fares also on 08457 225225 or from staffed stations.
charles heslett
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