David Hockney: A Bigger Picture

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As Hockney himself maintained after the bruising reception of his book ‘ Secret Knowledge’, it is not really interested in how art gets made, just the product. All this activity culminated in Bigger Trees near Warter, which was painted to fill the vast end wall of Gallery III for the Summer Exhibition of 2007. What it means to me is so bound up with the singularity of the experience of making it: the extended being there with David and his household; that beautiful part of Yorkshire and how my familiarity with the landscape grew in parallel and inseparably with DH’s painting of it; I don’t expect to make another film in that way.

David Hockney: A Bigger Picture | Exhibition | Royal Academy

In no time we are back to the 90s and The Road to York Through Sledmore, dipping up and down between blazing orange buildings and eye-popping foliage. Vivid, provocative, original, fun, unpredictable, child-like are just some of the words that describe the genius of David Hockney. Read all Filmed over three years, this documentary is an unprecedented record of a major artist at work. A detailed discussion of this picture, by a member of the Tate Gallery's Conservation Department, is to be found in Completing the Picture (op. When he was painting on as many as six panels at once, the bare bones of the composition were so perfect and magical, like a Fauvist Matisse, I would find myself wanting him to stop.So for instance in my David Hockney: Double Portrait, the double interviews suggested a quite formal film around body language. At that time he was sitting for a portrait by the late Lucian Freud, and walked every day to Freud’s house from his own London home, through Holland Park. The exhibit included oil paintings, charcoal drawings, sketches, digital videos and iPad paintings mostly concerning landscapes depicting Yorkshire. With great rapidity, not only has he mastered new digital means of drawing, but he has also developed a novel way of recording landscape as a moving image using nine separate cameras. This work brings together two of Hockney's themes from his paintings of the late 1960s and early 1970s: the swimming pool, and the double portrait.

David Hockney: A Bigger Picture – review - The Guardian

The dustwrapper is Near Fine+: crisp and vibrant, Fine but for a minor 5cm surface scratch to the front panel. One of my favourite phases of his art were the paper pools, a medium that was probably the most tyrannical of any of the many he’s taken on, involving the moulding of coloured paper pulp into one-off images. It is all things bright and beautiful all the time, with the possible exception of solitary stumps in winter clearings. Undoubtedly a whole number of film-makers and films have had an enormous impact on my taste and on my appreciation of what is possible in film.The film had a lot of work to do in placing Hockney back in Yorkshire and describing his motives for doing so. Look at these images in reproduction, on a tiny scale in the comfort of your own home, and they may well appear absurd, the white hawthorn bursting out in great maggoty slugs, the shadows making glove puppet bunnies. In the foreground, a yellow diving board slants away from lower right corner, leading the viewer's gaze towards the centre of a large swimming pool, where water fountains into the air, capturing the moment right after someone has dived in. First edition first impression large format hardback in fine condition, no markings, pages clean, binding firm. And for such a restless innovator, so mindful of art history in everything he makes, this is surely a necessity.

David Hockney: A Bigger Picture (PAL with Subtitles) David Hockney: A Bigger Picture (PAL with Subtitles)

David Hockney RA studied at Bradford School of Art from 1953 to 1957 and the Royal College of Art from 1959 until 1962. How they are made – this kind of mark, that variation on Van Gogh, those Fauve-bright colours or stylised cut-outs or vast, multi-panel grids – these are the constant focus, much more than the landscape itself.

I’d love to think I’ve captured something of the universality and mystery of the creative enterprise, let’s say a portrait of an artist as an older man. The blocks of colour were rollered onto the canvas and the detail, such as the splash, the chair and the vegetation, painted on later using small brushes. The surface of these prints has an easy-clean sheen and at more than a metre high they look like what they are: quick studies of dandelions and leafy lanes voluminously enlarged. The world, every corner of it, is full of infinite interest, and it is possible to see it freshly – in a bigger and better picture. We went back to a more or less chronological narrative, which in turn meant we had to jettison a lot of good synch interview sequences because they showed paintings in the background that in the film timeline had not yet been made.