The Great Receiver...

BRILLIANT! These seem like the only words I can use to describe seeing ‘David Hockney: A Bigger Picture’ at the Royal Academy, London on Thursday. I left the exhibition grinning from ear to ear, feeling totally uplifted and as if I had just enjoyed an immensely satisfying meal. I haven’t enjoyed an exhibition so much in years. The exuberant colour, the light, the sheer continual, restless inventiveness was just so wonderful to participate in. It made me feel so alive. How many contemporary art exhibitions can you say that about these days?

At 74, Hockney’s playfulness, skill, and visual intelligence and creativity just seemed to knock so many younger artists into a cocked hat. Aren’t the young meant to be the ones with all the fresh ideas? (Not if Birmingham’s Eastside Projects current ‘Painting Show’ is anything to go by either. In stark contrast, I left this exhibition feeling thoroughly frustrated and empty recently). ‘A Bigger Picture’ was brilliantly hung, taking the audience through the development of Hockney’s involvement with the East Yorkshire Wolds and the many developments he has made in the last 5 years in his attempts to capture the ever changing landscape through the seasons. My particular highlight was the room of paintings of the Wold Woods (above), where things just seemed to come together incredibly well: the handling, the language of marks, the colour and light, and the scale.

I also found myself really liking the more recent work created more from memory, which I thought I wouldn’t enjoy so much as it seemed so mannered or stylized, but they made perfect sense in the flesh, particular with the enormous final painting, ‘The Arrival of Spring’ (above). I loved these, and felt so ‘there’ in these landscapes. They seemed so rooted in a Modernist tradition to me, and reminded me a lot or Rousseau as well as the more obvious touchstone of Matisse. I think Rousseau’s landscapes are terrific, and have always admired his treatment of forms and the clarity of his vision. These are some of the qualities I think were reflected in Hockney’s most recent paintings. The works created on his i-Pad were also amazing, (below) and really got me thinking about whether this would be a good tool for me with my efforts at working on location if I could get to grips with the technology…

This all seemed a perfect start to 'A Portrait of The Edgelands'. I sit and write this tremendously excited by the possibilties, my head full of ideas, thinking, 'Yes, I can!'.

And what does The Great Receiver mean? Come back in a few days....