david hockney

every time i ambled past the royal college of art there was this huge line of people ..
it never ended…day after day…week after week,it just never seemed to fade…
so yesterday me and my man took a deep breath and finally got in there,resigned to at least a one hour wait outside in the cold…
but then within five minutes, this gorgeous ever so tall girl came over and said she had two tickets to sell cause her friends hadn’t turned up…
she said she’d been walking slowly up and down the line , and picked us out cause we looked her type.
and oddly enough, i had decided to wear brand new jet black corduroy with highly polished chelsea boots for the perfect art gallery moment.
pretentious?… definitely… joyously so.
pretentious people are simply those who have ideas above their station in this life.
without pretense,there would have been no eye liner’d young elvis..or little richard…or david bowie.

before we went into the royal college of art, i gazed at the big blow up flag of hockney with paintbrush in one hand , plus another in the other..
great clothes and shoes,that nudged me into thinking how he has more appeal than most of todays jock-ish pop stars.
he also has a good face..always did..at every stage of his life,he looks fantastic…he fits the skin he’s in.

y’know it’s a great thing to see people do their best work in later years.
this is very very life affirming, cause there are many unhappy uncreative inert folk out there who would attempt to fill your heart with their hopelessness..
there’s a self defeating notion in culture that says we must peak early…and there’s a lot of cases that nearly prove the point,
but for those who stay willing,skills along with sensibilities accumulate over the years, which means later in life they can get work done fast by getting things right quicker…
more importantly they don’t loose the joy or desire to work.
their days have structure with a level of calm for the work to get done.
this surely must be the case with david hockney,cause one thing that blows your mind about that exhibition is the absolute quality and amount of work he’s done for this show…not one frame was weak…  none of it was overshadowed by his early familiar work.

another thing that charms me about his pictures is how effortless they look.
there’s surely a load of technique at work,but it’s downplayed behind an almost childlike stroke.
you get such a sure sense of height,depth and space…and joy.
i guess all that time painting the vast canyons on the west side of america set him up for painting those deep rolling hills of yorkshire too.
then there’s all this charged vivid colour…he uses pink or purple on a road, or blue for a tree, yet it always renders in a convincing way.
he captures billowing wind..light..time of day..season…all very elemental…. never in a boring geography teacher kind of way…it’s as groovy as it gets.

i left that show thinking how photography really set painters free to be interpreters of what they see,rather than feeling any pressure to paint things too literally.
also the way david hockney consolidated a friendly relationship between painting and photography is a clue to the measure of the man…
wide open…wide open to whatever he can use…those other things he’d done using digital video cameras or the ipad were very engaging too..
you could see he even had his own certain ipad stroke from using the little stylus on the glass screen.

as we wondered out past the gift shop selling all the hockney merchandise, i smiled at seeing one of his forest paintings on an otherwise bog standard tray you’d eat your supper off..
for THIRTY QUID……
and they were selling like hot cakes..just like a rock star sells the t-shirts.
this show will generate millions and millions as it travels around the world in the future.
i’m not afraid to say i do admire the financial power of art…
it’s the biggest fingers up to those small minded money grubbers who trivialize art  … especially during these credit crunch days .

i love how *credit crunch* translated into arty french is *craquement de credit*… it sounds better when you say it that way.