Image:He’ll do it his way … David Hockney. Photograph: Chris Ison/PA
David Hockney is one of Britain’s busiest artists – and one of its most genuinely creative. The enfant terrible of 1960s pop art no longer makes much attempt to follow fashion – if he ever did. He does what he wants, and paints what he wants, and says what he wants, and the results are impressive.
Hockney is currently influencing modern culture on three fronts in highly original ways. As a painter, he has an exhibition of new, super-sized Yorkshire landscapes opening at the Royal Academy in January. As a fan of new technology when it serves his creative purposes, he is a noted exponent of iPad art. And as a provocative thinker, he has a book of interviews about his ideas on art with critic Martin Gayford coming out this autumn.
I fell in love with Hockney’s art as a teenager when I came across a reproduction of A Bigger Splash in the family encyclopedia. I was deeply drawn to the beauty of this image. Hockney fascinated me long before I had heard of any other contemporary British artist. Unprompted by critics or tastemakers, I found A Bigger Splash just an image by someone I had never heard of that captivated me. For this reason, because I know its power to be innate, I have a feeling his art will always have the capacity to intrigue and delight people as yet unborn, in the distant future, when many other artists who are lauded in our day mean nothing to anyone. An artist in the end is a creator of images: and Hockney has created profoundly memorable images, from early works such as Peter Getting out of Nick’s Pool to his current epic landscapes.
His landscape Bigger Trees Near Warter is currently on view at the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull, and like his other recent rural works it is a powerful addition to the long history of landscape art. The colours of Hockney’s recent works are strange and subtle. These paintings are rooted in observation – the artist setting up his easel in the Yorkshire countryside – yet the results are anything but prosaic. Purples and flaming reds sizzle in the vast spaces. The trees are repeated, eerie motifs, that for me evoke Renaissance woodlands by Uccello and Botticelli.
David Hockney has become Britain’s outsider art hero, ignoring London fashions, living in Yorkshire and painting his way into art history, where it is not the splash you make that counts, but the created image.
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