David Hockney is 85
There was an article on David Hockney in The Times (of London) yesterday, in which Hockney, 85, was promoting his new immersive art exhibition, Bigger and Closer.
I confess, I'm not one for these 'immersive' art exhibitions, Van Gogh, etc. But coincidentally, yesterday I finished reading Chronology (Taschen), a wonderful year-by-year guide through sixty years of Hockney's work, and his career has been nothing if not an exploration of the possibilities of mediums and new technologies (painting, photography, collage, printing, iphone/ipad drawings, video, etc). For him at least, immersive art feels like an organic step.
But my god - what a life! What a mind! Extraordinary curiosity and imagination...
I love this portrait of Hockney's parents. In fact, I have a copy of it on the wall above my desk. It reminds me very much of my own parents. One small part of my appreciation of Hockney is that he's a man from the humblest of beginnings in Bradford, Yorkshire. You'd be hard-pressed to come up with a less glamorous milieu from which a great and famous artist might emerge.
So much of Hockney's work is an investigation of perspective, of how we see, how our eye records things. The photo-collages he created are part of our photography vocabulary now, but they were incredibly innovative, and so good.
I could have selected almost any page in the book to share here, but the reason to share at all is simple: if you're looking for inspiration in your art practice, photo-life, whatever it is, you'll find it in this book. Hockney is extraordinarily prolific and protean - one can't help but discover ways to think differently about art, to imagine possibilities once again, and most important of all perhaps, to take delight not only in art, in creative practice, but in life, and the art of looking more closely.
