David Hockney: a Turner with an iPhone

VISUAL ARTS: A Bigger Message: Conversations with David HockneyBy Martin Gayford Thames Hudson, 248pp. £18.95

IN ONE OF THE FIRST revealing anecdotes in this book, the author describes how David Hockney sent a friend in prison a well-thumbed history of architecture. The friend’s reaction was that he had never read a greater history of the world than that. Hockney was stopped in his tracks. He realised that a history of architecture – how we build, see, behave, control and live – is indeed a history of civilisation itself.

And so it is that in this book Hockney argues that making art is a basic attempt to translate how we see and experience the world and that the resulting “pictures” have an unending fascination for people, for it is through them that they in turn see the world. It is a profound thesis and one that, as an artist, I believe in absolutely. How much do we really see and how much of what we see is conditioned by how others represent the world to us?

To illustrate the argument, Hockney’s dialogue with Martin Gayford over a 10-year period since his return from a quarter century in Los Angeles to paint his native east Yorkshire, around Bridlington, covers a wide range of time-honoured themes emanating from his experience as an artist. This gives the book its authority, charm and accessibility. It is from the heart.

Other books and conversations with the artist have been published. Some of the arguments have been partially voiced before and some are more familiar. Here, however, the cool prose, the avoidance of the congested artspeak that is such a blight on contemporary criticism, the smart production values and generous illustrations make this a treat to read. Part anecdote, part diary, part essay, part biography, it’s a shot in the arm for all painters and a must-read for all who want a sound and stimulating introduction to the great challenges of any artist that are both timeless and pertinent.

Precociously gifted as a child, Hockney has always championed the primacy of drawing. Yet throughout his career he has been besotted with every new technology, from Polaroid to photocopier to iPhone, which he used to drive forward his art. In the 21 chapters he discusses with Gayford the possibilities and limitations of these, plus the pros and cons of western painting’s ability to equip an artist to deal with the basic concept of how to see and how to mark what we see.

And Hockney, who has returned to painting nature outdoors, questions throughout these deceptively casual conversations how we can still see and record the world in front of us with all we know, from cave paintings to iPhones. (Hockney, who has painted the single largest landscape painting completed outdoors, also paints daily bunches of flowers on his iPhone that he sends to his friends by e-mail.)

So this book is a crash course in it all. He is brilliant on photography – once thought destined to replace painting, now “a blip”, in his words, through its ubiquity and the lies it tells through Photoshop. Ultimately, he says, it makes the world look boring.

He challenges single-point perspective, saying it cannot replicate the total experience of a landscape, as the viewer is outside the scene. He follows that up with views on multiple takes in painting, to try to show how we really experience nature and space: up close, far away and peripherally, simultaneously. Add to this the debate on subjectivity: how we all see things differently and how this makes one accepted take on things impossible. Memory and how that adds to the mix, particularly as the work moves back into the studio, away from the direct source, are discussed.

He talks about theatre design informing spatial inventiveness in painting through its orchestration of a scene for the viewer. He is passionate about Van Gogh’s drawing in another chapter, attributing his brilliance to the fact that he had no formula: “Each image is something new.” He deconstructs a Claude Lorrain landscape through a virtual restoration in another chapter – reason alone to buy this book.

There are conversations about the topographical differences between California and Yorkshire, the Grand Canyon versus a hawthorn bush in four seasons, Mulholland Drive with a Wagner soundtrack versus contemplating an English tree in silence.

There is a discussion of Caravaggio and Vermeer’s use of lenses, either to project an image on to the canvas or to be influenced by the heightened, saturated nature of the image projected. He refutes any accusation of cheating or falsity, reminding us that all tools are available to all artists: they don’t make the artist. And artists also have the facility to distort, amend or change reality above and beyond any technology, giving them ultimate power.

And that is the nub of all Hockney’s arguments, that eventually, with all the knowledge and technology, it comes down to the artist’s unique eye and hand. And, in a way, as long as people make art that will be the case.

In my experience, many art students are crippled at the beginning of their careers by tutors and theorists providing reasons not to make work based on representation of the world around them. As a book by an artist who believes utterly in experience and the attempt to depict that experience, this is a refreshing and uncynical rebuttal of that attitude.

The book is a series of sympathetic conversations between a brilliantly informed artist and a refreshingly direct and understanding writer. Inspiring and useful for anyone attempting to make art instinctively, without being burdened by excessive theory, the book is a primer from someone who has come full circle in his own practice, a Turner with an iPhone.

James Hanley is a Dublin-based artist and a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy and Aosdana