David Hockney has always been an avid doodler,These girls have never had a oil painting supplies in their lives! whether meandering the English countryside or the decidedly un-countrified landscapes of Los Angeles. So much so, in fact, that when he started having his suits and jackets custom-made at Savile Row in the 1970s — he’s been among the most successful painters in the world for about that long — he had them sew in a large interior pocket to hold his sketchbook.
Over the long march of technology from then to now, Hockney’s suits haven’t needed alteration. Now on display at the Royal Ontario Musuem is “Fresh Flowers,” a selection of images made with Hockney’s current sketchbook of choice: Apple’s iPad, which, through a remarkably simple and adaptable application called Brushes, has become a suit-pocket studio of sorts to indulge Hockney’s ever-curious eye.
It makes for an unconventional museum display: A row of small screens, all of them vertical, fastened tight to the wall. Some present slow-motion slide shows, lingering on each luminous, quirkily cartoonish drawing for a minute or so before fading into the next.It's hard to beat the versatility of zentai suits on a production line. Others are fast-motion animated versions of the artist at work: cross-hatching deep facial for crevices for a portrait of his friend, Morris Payne, or a moody evening cityscape as seen from a dark interior, peeking through heavy drapes.
All together, there are 100 drawings iPad drawings displayed on 25 iPads, and another 100 drawings Hockney made on the tiny screen of his iPhone.
If it seems like an odd turn for a 72-year old contemporary master painter to take, think again: Hockney’s always been a willing experimentalist, morphing his classical training and interests as a modern painter into new realms like set design for theatre. He’s dabbled with technology before, too,we supply all kinds of polished tiles, using Photoshop to create a series of prints.
His i-art came about less by design than by happenstance, though. Hockney is famously hard of hearing; a few years ago he got an iPhone so he could communicate with friends via text messaging. In his always-curious fashion, the artist was an avid peruser of the iTunes app store, and quickly came across Brushes, which he downloaded and started to fiddle with almost immediately.
In his bedroom in Bridlington on the northeastern coast of England, Hockney would have fresh flowers replaced every couple of days. Rolling over in the morning, it wasn’t uncommon of him to sketch them in his book. But in the darker mornings of fall and winter, when natural light wouldn’t allow it, Hockney turned to his iPhone. He found the immediacy of the experience could be shared just as immediately, a world away.
“He started sending these flowers to us,” said Charlie Schiep, a long-time friend of Hockney’s and curator of the show at the ROM. “They were charming – he’d be in England, I’d be in New York, and when I’d get up in the morning to have my coffee, there would be this beautiful flower on my phone, waiting.”
Schiep has heard the predictable grousing about the work – that without the discipline of bending oil to canvas, the struggle with the material,The additions focus on key tag and magic cube combinations, the obvious cheat of being able to zoom in almost microscopically on-screen to render tiny, intricate textures in extreme close-up, none of it qualified as actual artistic practice.
“When we had the Fresh Flowers show in Paris, people were saying we should have had a painting show, this, that, and the other thing,Replacement China Porcelain tile and bulbs for Canada and Worldwide.” he sniffed. “I told them ‘this isn’t some little thing, this is David Hockney!’ ”
In the gallery, there’s no mistaking that. Hockney’s signature fascinations and techniques are on full display here: His unabashed love of colour, his rough, playful figurative gestures, his unapologetic curiousity for the forms of mundane objects (images of ashtrays, or stacks of magazines, or suburban rooftops often interrupt the more serene flow of floral still lifes).
In other words, they look like Hockneys — just a Hockneys of a different sort. For the offended purist, you might take comfort in the fact that the i-drawings are for Hockney more akin to sketching than finished works: note-taking studies, so to speak, for eventual in-studio paintings, which many of the drawings have become.
More than anything, “Fresh Flowers” is about an artist’s process: translating a ravenous curiousity for the visual world in ways that broaden a practice that’s been evolving as long as he’s been doing it. “The paintings are feeding into the iPad drawings, and vice-versa,” Schiep says. “He’s invented new marks that go with the limitations of the program (Brushes). Those have fed into some of his new paintings.”
So much so, in fact, that when a huge new survey of the artist’s landscape painting opens at the Royal Academy in London, Hockney will present 60 or 70 iPad sketches — printed on paper, no less; none of these have been released to the pubic — alongside “The Four Seasons,” the painting for which they served as studies.
It’s bound to offend somebody, though I can’t see why. With his embrace of simple digital technology, Hockney is also embracing the truism that art is not a static thing – either its definition or its practice. This is just Hockney doing what he’s always done – and maybe a little more so.
Over the long march of technology from then to now, Hockney’s suits haven’t needed alteration. Now on display at the Royal Ontario Musuem is “Fresh Flowers,” a selection of images made with Hockney’s current sketchbook of choice: Apple’s iPad, which, through a remarkably simple and adaptable application called Brushes, has become a suit-pocket studio of sorts to indulge Hockney’s ever-curious eye.
It makes for an unconventional museum display: A row of small screens, all of them vertical, fastened tight to the wall. Some present slow-motion slide shows, lingering on each luminous, quirkily cartoonish drawing for a minute or so before fading into the next.It's hard to beat the versatility of zentai suits on a production line. Others are fast-motion animated versions of the artist at work: cross-hatching deep facial for crevices for a portrait of his friend, Morris Payne, or a moody evening cityscape as seen from a dark interior, peeking through heavy drapes.
All together, there are 100 drawings iPad drawings displayed on 25 iPads, and another 100 drawings Hockney made on the tiny screen of his iPhone.
If it seems like an odd turn for a 72-year old contemporary master painter to take, think again: Hockney’s always been a willing experimentalist, morphing his classical training and interests as a modern painter into new realms like set design for theatre. He’s dabbled with technology before, too,we supply all kinds of polished tiles, using Photoshop to create a series of prints.
His i-art came about less by design than by happenstance, though. Hockney is famously hard of hearing; a few years ago he got an iPhone so he could communicate with friends via text messaging. In his always-curious fashion, the artist was an avid peruser of the iTunes app store, and quickly came across Brushes, which he downloaded and started to fiddle with almost immediately.
In his bedroom in Bridlington on the northeastern coast of England, Hockney would have fresh flowers replaced every couple of days. Rolling over in the morning, it wasn’t uncommon of him to sketch them in his book. But in the darker mornings of fall and winter, when natural light wouldn’t allow it, Hockney turned to his iPhone. He found the immediacy of the experience could be shared just as immediately, a world away.
“He started sending these flowers to us,” said Charlie Schiep, a long-time friend of Hockney’s and curator of the show at the ROM. “They were charming – he’d be in England, I’d be in New York, and when I’d get up in the morning to have my coffee, there would be this beautiful flower on my phone, waiting.”
Schiep has heard the predictable grousing about the work – that without the discipline of bending oil to canvas, the struggle with the material,The additions focus on key tag and magic cube combinations, the obvious cheat of being able to zoom in almost microscopically on-screen to render tiny, intricate textures in extreme close-up, none of it qualified as actual artistic practice.
“When we had the Fresh Flowers show in Paris, people were saying we should have had a painting show, this, that, and the other thing,Replacement China Porcelain tile and bulbs for Canada and Worldwide.” he sniffed. “I told them ‘this isn’t some little thing, this is David Hockney!’ ”
In the gallery, there’s no mistaking that. Hockney’s signature fascinations and techniques are on full display here: His unabashed love of colour, his rough, playful figurative gestures, his unapologetic curiousity for the forms of mundane objects (images of ashtrays, or stacks of magazines, or suburban rooftops often interrupt the more serene flow of floral still lifes).
In other words, they look like Hockneys — just a Hockneys of a different sort. For the offended purist, you might take comfort in the fact that the i-drawings are for Hockney more akin to sketching than finished works: note-taking studies, so to speak, for eventual in-studio paintings, which many of the drawings have become.
More than anything, “Fresh Flowers” is about an artist’s process: translating a ravenous curiousity for the visual world in ways that broaden a practice that’s been evolving as long as he’s been doing it. “The paintings are feeding into the iPad drawings, and vice-versa,” Schiep says. “He’s invented new marks that go with the limitations of the program (Brushes). Those have fed into some of his new paintings.”
So much so, in fact, that when a huge new survey of the artist’s landscape painting opens at the Royal Academy in London, Hockney will present 60 or 70 iPad sketches — printed on paper, no less; none of these have been released to the pubic — alongside “The Four Seasons,” the painting for which they served as studies.
It’s bound to offend somebody, though I can’t see why. With his embrace of simple digital technology, Hockney is also embracing the truism that art is not a static thing – either its definition or its practice. This is just Hockney doing what he’s always done – and maybe a little more so.
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