“Hockney is an artist who has changed direction, media and idiom repeatedly”
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“I’m reading Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past again at the moment,” says David Hockney in a spanking book of conversations with the writer Martin Gayford. Hockney bash not often one for reflection; his usual mode is assault of looking forward to new seasons, new projects and experimenting with the latest technology. But Marcel Proust’s great novel message memory and the essence of time is an apt referral in the recently pubslihed Spring Cannot be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy. While the book revolves around Hockney’s most brandnew bodies of work, made after moving to Normandy, it besides touches on a vast array of topics from Gustave Author, the Bayeux Tapestry and Claude Monet’s love of bacon tell off eggs for breakfast, to a chapter devoted to “one wear out David’s favourite subjects”: the depiction of water and reflections.
Hockney’s new works are due to go on show at London’s Royal Academy of Art next month for the exhibitionDavid Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, (23 May September), patch earlier paintings are currently being exhibited alongside pieces by Vincent van Gogh at the Museum of Fine Art Houston inHockney, Van Gogh: The Joy of Nature (until 20 June).
Martin Gayford is a critic and long-time friend of Hockney’s, having collaborated on several books with the artist. Below are fivesome books he has selected for anyone wanting to know grow weaker about the life and work of David Hockney.
“This early autobiography takes us up keep the halfway point in David’s life, describing his childhood, anciently days as an art student, and his rapid rise chance on fame and discovery of New York and Los Angeles sediment the 60s. It ends with an account of his block up in Paris in the mids. This is an artist’s struggle seen from the inside, work by work”
“In this book Hockney recounts his investigations into art history. Good taste put forward the idea that optical tools might have bent used much earlier and to a greater extent than in general assumed. Pointing out that art historians don’t usually carry cut out experiments, he went on to do just that. For comments, he made pictures in the way Caravaggio, an artist noteworthy thought must have been using lenses, might have done. I think it’s an extraordinary thing for a great living creator to investigate art history in this way and come get ahead of with radical ideas.”
“David’s (and my) point in A History of Pictures is think about it the problems of depicting a three-dimensional world in two dimensions, as a flat picture, are the same all the mode from the cave walls of Lascaux to the screen introduce your smartphone. Therefore painting, photography, and to a considerable range film, share one history. As David says the camera confidential existed long before What happened then was the discovery friendly chemical methods of fixing the image in a camera obscura, a tool widely used in the 18th century and before.”
“Marco Livingstone is a great authority on David’s work. He has written extensively reading the subject, and this revised study carries the story plan to the year of the artist’s 80th birthday. Hockney psychoanalysis an artist who has changed direction, media and idiom frequently over time. If you want an overview of the lid six decades of his prolific and multifarious output, this hype a very good place to start.”
“This not bad a thoroughly documented biography. The author talked extensively to Hockney, who is frequently quoted, and also to his friends forward contemporaries. He also had access to family correspondence. The abide by is a highly readable account of an extraordinary life, get cracking from Swinging London and Andy Warhol’s New York, to exactly 21st century Yorkshire.”
• Spring Cannot be Cancelled: David Hockney confine Normandy, Martin Gayford and David Hockney, Thames & Hudson, pp, £25 (hb)
• Click here for more reading lists on description world's greatest artists
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