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photography by Richard
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For all its pleasures, it's a show that could induce in Los Angeles
art lovers a feeling of suspense and even poignancy, for these works
were inspired by and executed in Hockney's native country and mark the
culmination of three years largely spent away from his L.A. home and
studio off Mulholland Drive. Although he won't state outright that he's
away from America indefinitely — he'll casually say things such
as, "I'm a claustrophobe, that's why I live in L.A." — he also
gives no timetable for his return.
Blame a great deal of his urge to roam on his newly discovered medium
of watercolors. What began as a few portraits in the late '90s flowered
into a group of works done in Spain, then bravura Norwegian and Icelandic
landscapes. Hockney learned the craft quickly and came to love loading
up his brush for the kind of strokes that require real commitment.
"A painting is an artist's account of looking at the world," he says
on this day, a credo he's stated before. The world he's seen recently
is revealed (though sometimes barely, as with one fog-shrouded row of
trees in the new show's untitled signature work), largely under northern
light. His studio in the Bridlington home's converted attic lets in
the same faint glow, and the L.A. show's "Bridlington. Garden and Rooftops
III" invites you to make what you will of the sedate view north from
it.
Hockney's friend, writer and cultural critic Lawrence Weschler, has
written an essay for LA Louver's catalog, and he finds "a return to
origins" in Hockney's autumn- and winterscapes: "the sense of returning
in winter, perhaps, to one's own springtime."
CONTINUITY, NOT CHANGE
Hockney leads the way to his tan Lexus, which he chose as the quietest
ride this side of a Bentley. He immediately rolls down his window and
lights a smoke, which he does at a rate of slightly more than a pack
a day when he's talking a lot. (He points out that Eisenhower has been
unjustly criticized for smoking 80 cigarettes on D-day — "I should
think he would have smoked 200.") Between conscientious tour guide business
— glances at the remains of York's ancient wall and the landmark
tower the York Minster — he continues to kvetch eloquently about
the antismoking forces in England and America. It's a theme he returns
to often, but his summation relies on a countryman's words and is aimed
straight at his sometime home: "Tom Stoppard says people in L.A. think
the choice is between smoking and immortality."
As we motor through small villages and down verdant ravines that, as
Hockney points out, were carved by glaciers rather than rivers, we pass
occasional flocks of sheep and Highland cattle, and fields that the
government has decreed will be forever reserved for cultivating oats,
wheat and barley.
"It's the food bin of England," Peter Goulds, LA Louver founder and
director, says of Hockney's native Yorkshire, noting that the artist
spent most of his childhood in the sooty city of Bradford in West Yorkshire.
Goulds, who first sold works by Hockney in the late 1970s, sees more
continuity than change in this hanging: "It's all part of what you could
call David's journey to light." Goulds helped Hockney mount a September
1998 show at the gallery titled "looking at landscape/being in landscape"
in which massive studies of American sites (including "A Bigger Grand
Canyon," which sold to the National Gallery of Australia for $3 million)
were hung near a series of Yorkshire scenes. The latter, though done
in oils, Hockney's most familiar medium, covered territory similar to
the recent watercolors. Goulds sees the watercolor spate as almost inevitable
for the "intellectually curious and technically proficient" painter.
"It was a medium he'd largely avoided; finally he had to take it on."
The 1998 show derived much of its inspiration from drives Hockney made
between Bridlington and the town of Wetherby, where his great friend
Jonathan Silver lay dying of pancreatic cancer. (The same disease had
claimed his confrere, curator Henry Geldzahler, in 1994.) "You might
as well live," was Hockney's way of summing up his determination not
to despair despite those deaths and a series of others — from
AIDS, age and other causes — among his oldest friends. Legendarily
devoted to his dachshunds, he was further dismayed by the death of his
frequent portrait subject Stanley (Hockney is a great fan of Laurel
and Hardy). That latter loss did create a kind of liberation —
he was no longer constrained by dog quarantine regulations that had
kept Stanley from joining him on visits to England. As the departure
of friends joined with his severe hearing loss to leave him increasingly
isolated in his canyon, the logic of spending time in England grew.
L.A. INSPIRATIONS
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Los Angeles Times AN L.A. PERSPECTIVE:
Hockney in his studio in 1990 |
Most of Hockney's London days, in the three years since he's been once again based there, are spent in his apartment and studio at the edge of Holland Park, where he walks most mornings while fetching the newspapers. ("I'm not really a reader of the Guardian," he'll sniff, showing little interest in their putting a loaned sketch of his on the front page this very Saturday as part of a neighborhood campaign to save what turns out to be his old post office.)
He has a brother living near Margaret in Bridlington and two more in business in Australia, but he dotes on the chirpingly delightful Margaret, a former nurse who has such an array of computers supporting her digital photography (much of it linked to her second career as a herbalist) that the BBC recently visited to film her at work. As a young nurse, she went to Zambia for a year but stayed three because the need was so great: "My sister has an innocence about her," he says lovingly. "She's seen life much more harsh than you or I. She's never earned any money in her life." He pauses for a wry look: "You have to be a big crook to get money."
The artist is able to be of and apart from the London arts community; a 2002 arrangement to trade portraits, each of the other, with Lucian Freud resulted in many walks across Holland Park (where, significantly, "I saw my first Northern European springtime in 22 years"). Hockney willingly sat for 129 hours; the older artist gave him but three to capture the forbidding Freud visage. Both men are "academicians," as the elite members of the Royal Academy of Arts are called, and are said to be privately unhappy that an architect was selected to head that group rather than Hockney's longtime painter colleague (they were at the Royal College of Art with director Ridley Scott in the early '60s), Allan Jones.
Hockney was the toast of swinging London before he characteristically removed himself from it. His arrival in Los Angeles in the mid-1960s (after a brief spell testing the water in New York) was vivifying: "I was so taken with the space, the beauty of it. It was … January 1964. You could drive anywhere; it hardly seemed to have a rush hour — you'd drive from Santa Monica to Pasadena at 6 o'clock, and it'd take you half an hour … move around the city with the greatest of ease in your private space."
He had arrived bearing the proceeds from his first large show in England: "I traveled with a letter of credit, took with me about three or four thousand dollars. I felt I was rich, very rich."
Hockney spent $900 on the Ford Falcon that would take him through 50,000 miles of exploration. "One day a week I used to drive around L.A., go anywhere, find out where I was from the Thomas Guide and then drive back. It was amazing, actually. I'd never felt freer, sexually free, everything."
If his paintings were not the first proclamation that L.A.'s swimming pools and palm trees were iconic, they were among the more powerful. And though he doesn't dwell on the impact of globally familiar images such as the almost audibly evocative snapshot-in-acrylics called "A Bigger Splash" ("I painted that in Berkeley actually — probably from a photograph — while I was teaching there for a semester."), he was and is pleased to claim his territory: "One of the great things about L.A. for me when I first went there was nobody had painted it. Paris had been painted by great artists, Italy, London — but in L.A., you didn't even know what famous building was there."
Still, he refused to put down immobilizing roots, despite the happiness he found there from 1964 through 1977. He was 28 and a growingly famous La Cienega boulevardier (his usual uniform was "a T-shirt") when he met 18-year-old art student Peter Schlesinger.
The new love was enough to uproot Hockney, as he describes in his easy, if telegraphic style: "A very L.A. person, very good-looking and very bright, full of curiosity. He actually made me come back to Europe — he wanted to live in London. I moved back to London just because of Peter, and when we broke up I went to live in Paris. And after that I felt I'd rather be in L.A., that's the place, that's where I can work. I had to get a green card again, but I found L.A. a stimulant. I wasn't quite tempted to just lie on a beach; I might have painted a kind of hedonism, but the artists themselves can't be hedonists. Artists are workers."
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photography by Richard Schmidt |
York proper and its suburbs are soon behind us as Hockney expertly pilots the sedan on the old Roman road, which soon resembles a country lane, rising 800 feet above sea level over the chalk hills ("wolds") between York and Bridlington. We're not far outside Stamford Bridge, where a noted prelude to the Battle of Hastings was fought, when he points out a pub that would look perfectly at home in a film adaptation of a Thomas Hardy book. As a 15-year-old schoolboy working an arduous summer job, "I'd go down there and have drinks." (This falls in line with his somewhat defensive boast, "I never had a cigarette before I was 9.") A half-mile on we pass a farmhouse surrounded by cornfields, where he'd stayed while he earned wages "stooking": "You picked up the sheaf of corn, tied it together with another and made it into a stook, then stuck them in the stubble. It was a hard day's work actually — the only consolation was it was rather beautiful looking out, on the shapes of the fields."
It's not the grandest manifesto an artist ever announced, but as he spent more time in England over the last couple of years, those fields called out to him. A number of the watercolors in the upcoming show, notably "Woldgate With Flowers and Blossom," recapture those days, showing landscapes that, he notes, "haven't changed a bit in 50 years." In addition to those and the almost riotous flora in the "36-Part Work," there are many wintry scenes, such as "Trees & Puddles, East Yorkshire," that use humble means to pull your eye into something actually as complex as one of Hockney's beloved Mahler symphonies.
Although the show's working
title used the phrase "After the Secret Knowledge," these paintings
clearly proceed beyond Hockney's recent studies of how the old masters
used (and achieved) perspective. Though he's still involved in intellectual
scraps with scientists from Stanford and Scientific American, the upshot
of his research was a repudiation of photography's Cyclops eye, and
a simple enough refutation of what the literal rendering of nature can
do: "It led me back to the land. I realized you could [only]
paint the landscape, because you can't photograph the landscape —
you can't get space in it." So I thought, 'Well my God, I should go
paint Yorkshire again.' "
Our destination is Bridlington, where we'll wander along the strand
and eat a hearty lunch, dinner and breakfast with his aide, Gregory
Evans, and the welcoming Margaret. (Hockney's companion of some years,
John Fitzherbert, prepares a lunch, heavy on pork, before taking to
his bed to fight a cold.)
But on the chatty, ambling ride to Bridlington, Hockney seems content
to pull over in key spots for reconsideration. He sits alertly in the
driver's seat, looking like he'd prefer the passenger seat, where he
spent much time doing smaller paintings with a board across his knees
to make an easel. Peering into the fields where the sun glowers but
never quite breaks through, he seems again to be following the skein
of memory that led him down these back roads. He's well aware that despite
inveighing against establishments artistic and political, he's been
under the covers with fame and wealth for more than three decades now.
There's probably no more celebrated world-class artist, and the accessibility
of his vibrant, involving canvases has somehow not hurt his standing
among critics and curators. In disregarding fashion and trend, he's
remained relentlessly fashionable.
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photography by Richard
Schmidt |
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His friend, Norman Rosenthal,
the Royal Academy of Arts curator, notes that the acclaim for Hockney's
work would not have come if the artist weren't "an amazingly competent
man" but sees his long-running success as more a function of being "constantly
inventive" and also because of "a great moral authority that comes through
in his art."
One of the more striking works in the LA Louver show is "The Road to
Rudston," executed in March of last year. Its barren trees and hedgerows
are rendered with almost manic brushstrokes, much resembling those in
Van Gogh's Provence sketchbooks, under darkly swelling rain clouds.
The painting is also to be found in a new hardcover collection called
"Hockney's Pictures: The Definitive Retrospective," where it sits above
one of his epigrammatic quotes. "I have always believed that art should
be a deep pleasure," it reads, "the very fact that the art is made seems
to contradict despair."
Rosenthal says Hockney "believes in life, and he believes in freedom,
and all those things he's stood for all his life — and whether
that was as a young man or now as an older man, he somehow hasn't changed.
He doesn't dye his hair blond anymore but that's all the difference
there is."
Hockney will admit that recent world events can induce moments of doubt,
and that "one of my selfish thoughts was, 'Well, maybe you should be
glad you're not too young.' " He gazes across the lane at the farmhouse
where five decades ago he would sleep rough, one of six laborers to
a room. "When you're young, the world excites you no matter what. It's
when you're old you actually want the silk underwear."
He reflects a moment. "You know what the Chinese say about painting?"
This he follows with a shrug that can only be described as philosophical:
"It is an old man's art."