David Hockney - A Bigger Picture at the Royal Academy

David Hockney - A Bigger Picture at the Royal Academy

17 January, 2012
by: Tom Jeffreys

Tom Jeffreys is surprisingly intrigued by David Hockney's exploration of rural Yorkshire at the Royal Academy.

In terms of subject matter, David Hockney's massive new show at the Royal Academy, entitled A Bigger Picture, may be a kind of love letter to the artist's native Yorkshire, but it's also just as much about craft – what it means to make a mark. On display are landscape works from as far back as 1956 – a pair of drab post-war affairs – but the focus is on the artist's recent, near-obsessive documentation of the Yorkshire countryside. There's sketchbooks, watercolours, video, photocollage and colossal multi-canvas paintings that, taken together, form an impressive visual tribute to the natural beauty of rural Yorkshire. The county's tourist board must be delighted. Yorkshire Tea – handing out free cuppas at the media view – certainly are.

The most immediately noteworthy aspect of the exhibition is a series of works entitled The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011, which takes over the entire of the Royal Academy's vast Gallery III. It consists of 51 of the large-scale iPad drawings that were so well publicised in advance of the exhibition, as well as a monumental painting that covers no less than 32 separate canvases. In these, and other summer depictions, the heat is – as ever with Hockney – palpable. The artist's characteristically saturated high key colour palette predominates, with pinks and violets to the fore amongst foliage of vivid, zinging greens. But winter saps the intensity of colour, as the hot summer gives way to the muted, frost-tipped tones of January and February.

Throughout the exhibition the effect of the seasons is explored repeatedly, as Hockney returns again and again to the same spots. Trees stumps, pathways, hedgerows, a particular chunk of of broken wall: each changes with the cycles of the weather, but provides a mote of continuity too. Nowhere is this better realised than in a series of eighteen-screen video 'collages'. Picking up on Hockney's well-known photocollage technique from the 1980s, these moving image versions make use of some fairly straightforward visual tricks (autumn and winter shown side by side, for example) but they're dazzlingly beautiful nonetheless.

For me what the Royal Academy does very well is to site these recent works within the larger story of Hockney's artistic career. It's an obvious move and one that you could easily imagine getting overlooked by more theory-driven institutions. But it's an important one, for me at least, because these recent works can seem a little vacuous at first – interesting to look at but ultimately with not all that much to say: the point that nature is cyclical and something to be cherished is pretty standard stuff. But by providing career context, the curators suggest that Hockney's relationship with nature is a little more complex (and therefore interesting) than might at first appear.

The point, I think, is that Hockney's works are less about nature as something distant or pure or 'other'; but more about nature as a concept – one already filtered through a man-made prism, already viewed through, in Hockney's case at least, thick, round, horn-rimmed specs. Because the nature of these Yorkshire works is not natural. The English countryside – the countryside depicted here of hedgerows and trees, fields of rape seed, road signs, 4x4s and the double lines of a tractor journey – is a man-made spectacle, the result not of nature's boundless gifts but of centuries of agricultural activity.

As such, these works become more an exploration of humanity's interaction with the environment. The glowing oblong grandeur of Salts Mill and the dirt brown, lilac-roofed terraces that stand nearby become just as much a part of Hockney's Yorkshire vision as the neatly scythed edges of a wheat field or a pile of felled trees, the crispness of the cut line exaggerated by layers of slick brushwork. This conflation of the natural and the man-made – or rather the difficulty in separating the two – is made explicit in works like Double East Yorkshire (1998). Here, the contrasting techniques in which the paint has been applied (from thin washes to thick impasto) both mimic and create the varying marks made by the farmers' machinery. In this way, the countryside is a collage, and the business of making a mark – be it with brush or plough – becomes one and the same, as Hockney aligns himself with the farmers of Yorkshire history.

It's in this light that the iPad drawings make sense – as the ultimate high-definition, hyper-real  realisation of Hockney's ever-vivid form of expression. Alongside the open-air sketches, the studio paintings, the videos, the collages, they constitute a broad and complex response to the issue of what it is to make a mark in the world. The surfaces, both on screen and when printed onto paper, bring something new, and require a new way of looking – not only for Hockney, but for us too. We continue to change, and our landscape changes with us.

David Hockney - A Bigger Picture is at the Royal Academy from Saturday 21st January to Monday 9th April 2012.

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Image: copyright David Hockney. Photo credit: Richard Schmidt

Tom Jeffreys