The October 2006 issue of British Vogue features a wonderful and witty piece on Mr Hockney. The Author and photogropher of the article is one Christopher Simon Sykes, more on him later.
Written just before the amazing Bigger Trees Near Warter, it hints of what was to come. It's an exciting read.
The article focuses on the artists relationship with the wolds and his move into working with oils and multi-canvas works.
The article isn't available to read online so I've transcribed a fair bit of it.
Hockney's Homecoming
David Hockney, the nation's favourite painter, and a picture of elegance in a checked cashmere suit, pink shirt and white flat cap, is laughing, which is something he does a lot. The cause of this particular outburst is the memory of him and his French assistant, Jean-Pierre Goncalves de Lima, recently being nabbed by four coppers on a remote road in East Yorkshire. "We were driving up a tiny little road in Woldgate," he told me, "where you'd be lucky to see three cars an hour, when this police car stopped us and three policemen and a police woman jumped out and gave us each a ticket for not wearing our seatbelts. One of them was lecturing us along the lines of 'death is everywhere', while I was thinking, 'Well, life is lurking everywhere, too.' It was very funny. I said to Jean-Pierre, 'It was worth the £60 just for the story."
David is constantly amused by the idiosyncrasies of country life.
Another example being the lurid headlines in his favourite local newspaper, the Driffield Times, which has recently included such gems as 'STEAM ROLLER HORROR ON HIGH ST' 'SEVERED EAR FOUND IN YORKS CAR'
and 'MAYHEM ON THE STREETS FEARED'. He and Jean-Pierre now refer to the paper as the "News of the Wolds".
The article continues with a description of the East Riding and Yorkshire Wolds together with Mr Hockney's history with the area.
"my first real trip up here was in 1951 when I came to work on Foxcovert Farm, between the villages of Wetwang and Huggate, in my summer holidays. I cycled there from Bradford and I remember thinking how beautiful the landscape was, it was more cultivated than West Yorkshire, and unspoilt."
To begin with he painted predominantly in watercolour, entranced by an environment that has changed little over the years and is remarkably free of electricity pylons and road signs. He loved the fact that the roads were empty of traffic and soon began to think of the Wolds as his private estate. The watercolours were the first pictures of East Yorkshire he painted from nature, and he soon became a familiar figure, standing at his easel in the fields, his little white van for transporting his materials parked to one side, working in all weathers and at all times of year. "The first winter I spent here," he recalled, "I began to see how beautiful the winters were. There was far more colour than I expected." Occasionally the farmers would come and talk to him. "They thought my paintings were very accurate, and talking to them I noticed that they knew just how beautiful it is here."
When I first became friendly with him, the summer before last, he was well into his new oil-painting phase. "Going back to oil painting was thrilling," David told me. "When you've been doing watercolours, oil paint is like a luxury medium. You can do what you want with it. With watercolour you have to work from light to dark. You're more restricted." I first met David when Lindy Dufferin, an artist friend of mine who was staying with him, brought him to tea. He was so captivated by the view from my house that a few days later he was found painting halfway up the drive.
David has an electrifying presence which enthuses all those around him. At 69, in spite of the fact that his once dyed-blond hair is now a gentle grey, he still has a boyish look about him. He is passionate about many things, whether it is a furious tirade about the government's smoking ban or a compelling discourse on perspective in photography and painting. His eyes sparkle with humour. I suggested that he should produce a flick-book for his landscape show that was cheap and easy to produce. "You could give it away," I said. Raising one eyebrow he replied, "We've got to make a living you know."
Later the article provides a great insight into his latest works
"The paintings I'm doing now," he told me, "are probably the largest landscape paintings ever painted out-of-doors. I'm using six canvasses, each 3ft by 4ft, making the picture 6ft by 12ft, which is enormous. These big paintings place the viewer right in the middle if the landscape. When you take a photograph, there is a void between you and where the picture begins, but when I'm painting I remove that void."
"For small oils, you paint with your elbow," he said. "When you get to the bigger ones, you're painting with your shoulders, and when you put a few together, you're painting with your whole body. You move up and down and as you get more excited, you get bolder. I hadn't painted like that, out-of-doors with nature, for years."
And the article ends with this
Before I left to return to London, we took a walk on the beach, and as we once again mused upon the beauty of the East Yorkshire landscape, David left me with an interesting observation. "Landscapes and portraits," he said, "are both people on the surface of the Earth.
When you're here for a length of time and you're looking at the landscape daily, you see that at every moment it is full of life. Even in mid-winter, the trees are still alive."
Gorgeous.
The article and photographs, as I mentioned, are by Christopher Simon Sykes. His house is Sledmere house, which must be very nice indeed, and I love the fact that Mr. Hockney was found halfway up the drive the following day!
As I wrote up the exerpts last night I thought to myself that the name of the author rang a bell. Then it came to me, Christopher Simon Sykes is the author of the NEW HOCKNEY BOOK! I had read about the book in this months Vogue and had a talk to CM about it. It was her in fact that first alerted us to the above Vogue article in the first place.
Later that evening I was reading this months World Of Interiors and what do I find but a beautiful article with stunning photograps by Mr. Christopher Simon Sykes! I had bought the mag last week and had admired the photogs (of an amazing place in Tangiers ) and so it seems a small world sometimes, although in this case - a wonderfully small one.
To pre-order follow the link
http://www.amazon.co.uk/David-Hockney-Christopher-Simon-Sykes/dp/0385531443
To buy World Of Interiors I usually go to WHSmiths in Prospect Centre, not many newsagents stock it.
No comments:
Post a Comment