David HockneyBritish Contemporary Artist

Born 1937 Bradford

David HockneyBritish Contemporary Artist

Born 1937 Bradford

Style Influences on the artist. ’Trademark’ response to the subject in terms of how the artist has used the media.

Subject Matter

MediaHandling

VisualElements

Composition

Scale

Mood And

Atmosphere

Choice of subject matter; sources of inspiration and influence; effect on the work.

Choice of subject matter and media; how the artist has used the media and used sources of inspiration andinfluence.

Line; Tone;Colour;Shape; Texture; Pattern; how they Have been combined/ applied; their effect on the work.

Arrangement; (pose in figure); viewpoint; focal point; how things are arranged on the canvas; how space is used.

The size of the work; the artist’s choice of scale to create effect in the work; the comparison between items of differing scale.

How the mood and atmosphere of the work hasbeen created; what the work communicatesto the viewer; how it makes them feel.

David Hockney Born 1937 David Hockney is a British contemporary artist.He is a fascinating artist because his work has developed so much over the course of his career. He has continuously found new subject matter and ways of producing his work. He is currently working with draw and paint applications, producing images on his i pad and i phone.His working life to date spans approximately sixty years. Throughout this time Hockney has experimented with many different types of media, including watercolour, oil and acrylic paint, and photography.Hockney was influenced by the impressionist and post impressionist styles; particularily expressionism and cubism. Pop Art too influenced his working style in the 1960’s and 70’sHe was born in Bradford, Yorkshire. He attended Bradford College of Art and The Royal College of Art in London.

Impressionism was the

name given to a new style of painting adopted by a group of artists in France around . The name ‘Impressionism’ suggests that the artists were trying to capture an impression or ‘the moment’ in their work. These artists worked quickly using short brushstrokes and dabs of pure colour. They worked ‘in situ’. This means that they worked in the situation e.g. outdoors, or with the subjects present so that they could capture what they could see. Monet, Pissaro, Degas, Cezanne & Renoir are regarded as famous impressionist artists.

Modern life and the way that ordinary people spent their free time were popular subjects with many Impressionist painters. They showed us the theatres, cafés, and popular countryside resorts of late 19th-century Paris.

Impression Sunrise 1872 Claude Monet

Luncheon of the boating party 1881 Auguste Renoir

Post Impressionism was

the name given to the style adopted by many artists who were influenced by the work of the impressionist artists early on in their careers. They then continued to develop and exaggerate their own style. Cezanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Gauguin & Seurat are all post impressionist artists. Pointillism, Expressionism, Cubism and Fauvism are all styles whose foundations are found within the Post Impressionist movement.

Seurat … Pointillism

Van Gogh ... Expressionism Cezanne … Cubism Matisse … Fauvism

Hockney’s Subject

Matter

Portraits Friends, parents, and lovers.

Landscape Swimming pools, the Hollywood Hills, American landscapes, Yorkshire landscapes.

Still Life Plants and flowers, fruit, table tops with assorted objects

Hockney’s Style In his earliest work Hockney painted in an impressionistic way. With subdued colours and brushstrokes in evidence. However when he left England to go to America in the 1960’s his work became much bolder, brighter and more colourful. This was mostly because of the different climate in California. Blue skies and bright sunshine meant that colour became more vibrant.Hockney was influenced by Pop Art. This means that images depicting popular American culture feature in paintings. For Hockney, swimming pools in back gardens were an example of this culture: in stark contrast to the lives of ordinary British people at that time. Hockney used acrylic paint and applied it flat in a less realistic style.In this painting Hockney was determined to capture ‘the moment’ of the splash.Flat blocks of colour, shape and pattern is evident in Hockney’s work from this period.

A Bigger Splash 1967

1960’s – 70’s

My parents 1977

Hockney’s Style 1980’s 1990’s

Between 1970 and 1986, Hockney created photomontages, calling them joiners. He began this style of art by taking Polaroid photographs of one subject and arranging them into a grid layout. The subject moved while being photographed, so that the pieces show the movements of the subject from the camera's perspective. In later works, Hockney changed the technique, moving the camera around the subject.Creation of the "joiners" occurred accidentally. He noticed in the late sixties that photographers were using cameras with wide-angle lenses. He did not like these photographs because they looked somewhat distorted. He began to work more with photography and stopped painting for a while to exclusively pursue this new technique. Frustrated with the limitations of photography and its 'one eyed' approach, however, he returned to painting.

Pearlblossom Highway April 11-18 1986

Mother

Hockney’s Style

During the late 1990’s Hockney returned to England and began to re-discover the landscape that he had left behind for sunny California in the 1960’s.

He found the landscape of east Yorkshire to be beautiful and was very taken with the subtlety of colour.

His painting style became very focused on colour, shape pattern and texture. His work from this time is not representational but is stylised and decorative.

Brushstrokes are evident. He uses dashes and dabs. In some areas the paint is applied flat and without tone. Outline is sometimes used. Refer to Impressionism, Post Impressionism, especially Expressionism and Fauvism.

1990’s - 2009

Hockney’s Style

Since 2009, Hockney has painted hundreds of portraits, still lifes and landscapes using the Brushes iPhone and iPad application, often sending them to his friends. His show Fleurs fraîches (Fresh flowers) was held at La Fondation Pierre Bergé in Paris. A Fresh-Flowers exhibition opened in 2011 at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada, featuring more than 100 of his drawings on 25 iPads and 20 iPods. In late 2011, Hockney revisited California to paint Yosemite National Park on his iPad.

In these paintings Hockney’s style remains as before; looking for colour, light, shape, pattern and texture but using a different medium.

2009 -

Hockney’s Media

Handling

Hockney has experimented with many different types of media during his career.

Oil Paint

i PadHockney has applied the paint thickly in order to achieve the texture in this landscape. The paint stands up off the surface of the painting. Brushstrokes are evident here.

How has Hockney used the tools in his ‘Brushes’ app to show all the visual elements in this still life?

Hockney’s Media

Handling Acrylic Paint

Acrylic paint can be applied flat in order to give a smooth surface. Colours can be blended giving an almost realistic but stylised appearance.

Using Polaroid snaps or photo lab-prints of a single subject, Hockney arranged a patchwork to make a composite image. Because the photographs are taken from different perspectives and at slightly different times, the result is work that has an affinity with Cubism.

Photographs

Cubism from Post Impressionism

“ Treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the cube and the cone”

Cubism was one of the most influential visual art styles of the early twentieth century. It was created by Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973) and Georges Braque (French, 1882–1963) in Paris between 1907 and 1914. The French art critic Louis Vauxcelles coined the term Cubism after seeing the landscapes Braque had painted in 1908 at L'Estaque in the style of of Cézanne. Vauxcelles called the geometric forms in the highly abstracted works "cubes." Other influences on early Cubism have been linked to African art. Picasso had first seen African art when, in May or June 1907, he visited the ethnographic museum in the Palais du Trocadéro in Paris.

The Cubist painters rejected the idea that art should copy nature, or that they should adopt the traditional techniques of perspective and modelling. They wanted instead to emphasize the two-dimensionality of the canvas. So they reduced and fractured objects into geometric forms, and then realigned these within a shallow, relieflike space. They also used multiple or contrasting vantage points.

Weeping Woman Picasso

Terrace of Hotel Mistral Braque

Hockney’s Visual

Elements

In this painting the logs form Lines which draw our eyes

in to the Focal Point

Shape is very evident in this double portrait. The two figures form bold shapes against the paler background. Each object makes a shape arranged carefully within the composition. Even the background is divided into areas or shapes.

The use of Colour in this

landscape is non representational, and the use of contrasting colours is very effective.

Yellow / Purple Red / Green Blue / Orange

Tone is used in a representational way in this i pad still life drawing and in these portraits.

Texture and Pattern are very evident in this landscape which is made up of six separate paintings.

Hockney’s Composition

A sense of perspective is very clear in many of Hockney’s paintings. Your eye is drawn to the focal point because of angles and lines in the composition.

Hockney uses classic composition techniques incorporating triangles and diagonals within his work. Like many other artists and photographers he uses the rule of thirds.

Hockney’s Scale

Much of Hockney’s work is very large in scale. Especially in the latest landscape paintings of Yorkshire and in his ‘Joiners’.

Hockney shows the grandeur of each scene by working in such a large scale and each canvas or photograph is treated as an individual study, with all the visual elements evident in each one.

Hockney’s Scale

Hockney’s Mood and

Atmosphere

The Mood and Atmosphere of Hockney’s work has changed dramatically from his early subtle, muddy, colours and dull atmospheres to the bright, sunny California paintings.

1956

1971

Colour and light contribute to Mood and Atmosphere. The Impressionists and Post Impressionists tried to capture ‘the moment’; the changing effects of light. They influenced Hockney and many modern painters in trying to create Mood and Atmosphere in this way

Hockney’s Mood and

Atmosphere

In Hockney’s more recent work he has returned to his native Yorkshire and is delighting in the glowing and rich colours he sees in this landscape. The mood and Atmoshere in these paintings is again suggested by light and colour. Often there is no sun and the scene appears cold as none of the colours used are warm or glow. Bright sunlight or strong directional light lifts the mood in the still life and landscape below..

Hockney’s Mood andAtmosphere

In this double portrait of Hockney’s parents, Mood and Atmosphere is created by colour, light, composition and how his parents relate to one another. Hockney’s mother is sitting quietly, patiently while her husband is simply reading the newspaper, not willing to ‘just sit’. Neither is talking but we have the feeling that they are content in each other’s company, each doing something different, but together at the same time. The sideboard placed between them seems to give a sense of distance.

Hockney’s Media Handling

Here is a short film which explains how Hockney made the landscape paintings in his exhibition

‘A Bigger Picture’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IZCaeF3AdgHockney on A Bigger Picture