Close your eyes and imagine any work by artist David Hockney. You might think of his pink pool paintings nestled on the Hollywood hills. Or, perhaps, the image of a flat mid-century modern house, made up of lush green mountains or high contrast, blue-white ripples meander through bodies of water, or even hot, golden sand. Perhaps you can understand his strange, multi-point perspective, which shows that the shadow of the diving board is sinking deeper while the world tilts upwards, showing the path of the concrete patio of manicured lawns.
But when I think of Hockney, my mind will move towards consumer technology. What I think of is the easiest little animals to be available in any era of his working age: fax machines, Xerox Copiers, Polaroid cameras and more recently iPad drawings have dominated their output over the past decade. Even his innovative embrace of lithography dates back to 1796 and feels like a technical boundary art form. Without these machines, Hockney would not be able to eliminate thousands of artworks in his career, thus helping him become a fixture for nearly every institution’s modern art collection.
More than 200 of these mass-produced prints are in the “should be reversed: David Hockney’s prints, Jordan D. The show is to turn Hockney into the “should be inverted”. Reclassification from painters provides a reliable reason for printmakers. No canvas is covered with acrylic. Instead, the show's room is filled with ink, printers, digital prints and photos.
It was hard to point out when Hockney began experimenting with technology, but his earliest Polaroid collage dates back to the early 1980s. Instead of being restricted by the framework, Hockney discovered “joining”, a technique that expanded the canvas through collage. He would take hundreds of photos to make panoramic or portraits to create images with animated, cinematic effects. Mother in Los Angeles in December 1982these images tilt from the exposed wooden beams on the ceiling to his mother posing on the chair, then slide over the carpet and put on Hockney's shoes. The edges of images often overlap and repeat like Cubist paintings, when the aperture adapts to subtle changes in light, light and pigments transfer from one photo to another. Pearblossom highway (1986) is one of my favorites from Antelope Valley, California, which uses 700 Dolly to depict the lonely state highway 138, with bone yucca trees flanking the two-lane road and in the dirt Repeat beer bottles and jars.
See: David Hockney tells observers how sadness and aging shape his paintings
Hockney's experiments with photography and collage continue to this day. He called these “photographic drawings” and incorporated himself and his friends into Lynch's slanted room and fused together in impossible dimensions. He uses Photoshop to achieve incredible works, in which people, paintings and furniture are digitized into a space. Since Hockney minimizes the lights and shadows of each object, the photos lose depth and abandons our innate understanding of how character relationships work. We lose our sense of the horizon and how we stand upright in these fictional places.
Perspective should be reversed (2014), retrospectively named after it, shows a group of middle-aged men sitting on a red trapezoidal table – from rectangle along the rectangle along the photoshop's conversion tool, while others are cut along this extreme shape, while others are Empty dining room chairs surrounded by paintings that point to or tend toward Hockney's similar subjects. Beige curtains hung on the left side of the room, with the hem blurred and glitches from the stain tool. What is added to the table is a part of fruits, potted plants and books. One cover stands out: TJ Clark's “Picasso and the Truth”. Hockney uses technology and cubist influence to build works that are more realistic than anything he has painted.
In addition to exploring the limits of photography, Hockney also looks at machines that can expand his painting practice. In the 1980s, he began using fax machines, copiers and laser printers that finally became affordable home office tools. In 1986, he purchased several photocopiers and started the “Homemade Prints” series. Just as he understands how lithographs create dynamic images by layering multiple inks, he runs the images multiple times through a colored copier, swapping cartridges whenever he wants to change the color. As the nascent technology is able to read the subtle color transitions of the gradient, the half-body texture becomes rough and pixelated, allowing him to reach new textures. A copy like this, Man Reading Stendhal, July 1986combining spotted patches of black, red, blue and green ink. The high contrast mode in the abstract graph looks like the safe mode found in the envelope.
Hockney has come up with a way to adapt to joinery techniques from his photo collage. When he participated in the 1989 St. Paul Biennale, he did not have a fax. A job, Seaside Hotel (1989), divided into 16 pages, each of the 8.5 x 11-inch paper combined into a unified 35 x 56-inch picture.
Understanding Hockney's affinity for mechanical production has led to a greater appreciation of his iPad drawings. Although some find digital work unobtrusive – “What does new media mean to Hockney, except to allow him to lie in bed?” Brian Allen once joked Art newspaper– It is obvious that artists are looking for the limits of mediums. He lost the imperfections that the replicator provides, but with similar Arrived at Woldgate, East Yorkshire in spring 2011 (211). (2011), we see how he uses the software's Pointillist Mark to make the algorithm, and the brush is smooth, consistent opacity.
iPad drawings are the most influential, but it is also the way to read his older technology. Hockney has never been a person worthy of appreciation from afar. He works with machines, each adding its own personality to the composition.
Until March 31, the Palm Springs Museum of Art’s “should be reversed”.
