Though only in its first week, “David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition” at the de Young Museum, San Francisco has the critics buzzing. In case you haven’t read all the press, we’ve put together a compendium of five notable reviews for your reading pleasure:
1. Financial Times: “David Hockney returns to LA” by Caroline Daniel
“Yes. Yes. Yes. You paint to show things, to show what I think of them. That’s how people see the world,” he [Hockney] says. “I can find excitement in the rain on a pool in Bridlington. Somebody else couldn’t. But I can, and that’s the excitement. I mean, yes. Every day. I get it. I’m alive. I feel alive.”
2. San Francisco Chronicle: “Hockney at the de Young - art that leaps boundaries” by Kenneth Baker
“I’d never watched myself draw before,” Hockney said in an exclusive interview at his Hollywood Hills studio, where a series of large landscape inkjet prints of his charcoal drawings blanketed the walls. “Because when you’re drawing, you’re always one step ahead, actually.
"Watching myself, when I slow the drawings down, was quite interesting because I could see that I was going all over (the iPad’s screen), and all over again. It doesn’t change the way I execute a drawing at all, but it was fascinating watching it.”
3. Wall Street Journal: “David Hockney’s Restless Decade” by Ellen Gamerman
Asked if he had any digital works currently sitting on his devices, Mr. Hockney pulled out his iPhone and opened a picture he’d taken from his bedroom window a few days before, an impossible multi-perspective shot of the sunrise for which he used an app, Juxtaposer, to stitch together four separate images. Back when photocopiers and fax machines were new, he made art using those machines.
More recently, he has been creating “cubist movies,” digital films employing as many as 18 cameras tilted at different angles to subtly distort a scene as it plays across multiple screens.
4. New York Times: “He’s Back, in a Defiant Blaze of Color” by Jori Finkel
But part of Mr. Hockney’s charm as a painter — and person — is a certain resilience or even insouciance, an unwillingness to abandon pleasure and beauty in the face of troubles. And his return to California this summer, after primarily living and working in England for the last eight years, has been accompanied by a return to color: not just any colors, but some of the famous cerulean and cobalt blues from his classic swimming pool paintings of the 1960s.
“Los Angeles has that effect on me,” said Mr. Hockney, smelling faintly of cigarette smoke and dressed in a smart gray suit with a canary-yellow shirt setting off his blue eyes. “The light there is 10 times brighter than anywhere else. It’s why Hollywood started there. Natural light was essential in 1910 for film.”
But as much as he embraced such tools, the iPhone and iPad have had an even bigger effect on him.
“I do think it is a new medium,” he said of the iPhone and iPad during a question and answer session with the press at the museum last week. “I found it more interesting than Photoshop because you can pick up a color from another color. And you can work very fast. And that’s something every draftsman is interested in.”
David Hockney “A Bigger Exhibition" is on view at the de Young Museum through January 20, 2014.
For more info on Hockney, visit his artist’s profile on our website.