True to Life, Twenty Five years of conversations with David Hockney, (2008), by David Weschler, University of California Press

 

Chapter 1 – Cameraworks – Staring Down a Paralyzed Cyclops (1983)

“About sixty years ago”, he [Hockney] concluded, “most educated people could draw in a quite skillful way. Which meant they could tell other people about certain experiences in a certain way. Their visual delights could be expressed….Today people don’t draw very much. They use the camera. My point is, they’re not truly, perhaps, expressing what it was they were looking at…to make it vivid to somebody else. If the few skills that are needed in drawing are not treated seriously by everybody, eventually it will die. And then all that will be left is the photographic ideal which we believe too highly of”.

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“My main argument was that a photograph could not be looked at for a long time. Have you noticed that?”

I mean, photography is all right if you don’t mind looking at the world from the view of a paralyzed Cyclops – for a split second. But that’s not what its like to live in the world, or to convey the experience of living in the world”

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And the reason you can’t look at a photograph for a long time is because there’s virtually no time in it – the imbalance between the two experiences, the first and second lookings, is too extreme.

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Looking at you now, my eye doesn’t capture you in your entirety, but instead quickly, in nervous little glances. I look at your shoulder, and then your ear, your eyes (maybe, for a moment, if I know you well and have come to trust you, but even then only for a moment), your cheek, your shirt button, your shoes, your hair, your eyes again, your nose and mouth. There are a hundred separate looks across time from which I synthesize my living impression of you. And this is wonderful. If, instead, I caught all of you in one frozen look, the experience would be dead – it would be like…it would be like looking at an ordinary photograph.

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…but what finally can compare to the image of another human being?

Page 11

“That’s the whole point”, Hockney confirms. “In ordinary photographs, everybody’s stuffed”.

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….with this other one here of Kas sitting in a blue chair, I kept having to rephotograph the chair to get it right. As it turned out, the chair looks much larger than it actually is, but that’s because it seemed that way, with Kas sitting in it. The same thing happens with the leafy tropical plant next to Stephen Spender in the other collage: It’s much larger than it actually is, but that’s because I got interested in it. Relative importance, not accuracy, was what I was trying to convey. Which is to say, the entire process was just like drawing”.

“The camera is a medium,” Hockeny suddenly explained. “It’s neither an art, a technique, a craft, nor a hobby – it’s a tool. It’s an extraordinary drawing tool. It’s as if I, like most other photographers, had previously been taking part in some long-established culture in which pencils were used only for making dots – there’s an obvious sense of liberation that comes when you realize you can make lines!”.

There is in some of these collages, as in some of Hockney’s finest pencil drawings, a remarkable psychological acuity at work.

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“I think some of the most effective collages in both the Polaroid’s and the my more recent series involve the theme of looking – of looking at people looking. There’s a kind of doubling, an intensification of the experience.”

Well, the Polaroid squares themselves make you look at this picture of Nick in much the same way. The grid guides your eye, summoning up countless varied details and relationships in an almost mathematical profusion. Each middle square is surrounded by eight others, corners are surrounded by three, side squares by five, and so on. You end up looking at the collage in much the same way he is looking at the Picasso reproduction.

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“For that matter”, Hockney continued after a pause, “looking itself is the central subject of all of these collages. Ordinary photography, it seems to me, is obsessed with subject matter, whereas these photographs are not principally about their subjects. Or rather, they aren’t so much about things as they are about the way things catch your eye. I don’t believe I ever thought as much about vision, about how we see, as I have during the last several months.” And Hockney’s collages are in turn a school for vision. Ordinary photographs present a whole, from which details can be elicited. Hockney seems to suggest that this is the opposite of how we actually see the world. For him, vision consists of a continuous accumulation of details perceived across time and synthesized into a large, continually metamorphosing whole. “Working on these collages” Hockney explains, “I realized how much thinking goes into seeing – into ordering and reordering the endless sequence of details which our eyes deliver to our mind. Each of these squares assumes a different perspective, a different focal point around which the surroundings recede to background. The general perspective is built up from hundreds of micro perspectives. Which is to say, memory plays a crucial role in perception. At any given moment, my eyes catch this or that detail – they really cant keep any wide field in focus all at once – and its only my memory of the immediately previous details which allows me to form a continuous image of the world. Otherwise, for instance, turning my head the world would black out at the sides – but it doesn’t! which is really quite remarkable  when you think about it. And which, again, is a part of the visual experience that gets falsified in ordinary photography.

Page 20     

Pablo Picasso, The Red Armchair,
1931

The cubists, you know, didn’t shut their eyes. People complained about Picasso, for instance, how he distorted the human face. I don’t think there are any distortions at all. For instance, those marvellous portraits of his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter which he made during the thirties; he must have spent hours with her in bed, very close, looking at her face. A face looked at like that does look different from one seen at five or six feet. Strange things begin to happen to the eyes, the cheeks, the nose – wonderful inversions and repetitions. Certain ‘distortions’ appear, but they cant be distortions because their reality. Those paintings are about a kind of intimate seeing.

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But really, its [Cubism] rather about the structure of seeing the object. If there are three noses, this is not because the face has three noses, or the nose has three aspects, but rather because it has been seen three times, and that is what seeing is like.

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It wasn’t just that people began focusing just of the grid (seeing Hockney’s as yet another in a series of modernist variations on the grid theme – Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, and so forth). Rather, it was that the rectangular grid remained trapped in the aesthetic of the view out a window that had been one of the principal targets of the entire cubist movement.

            “It can’t be just a coincidence that cubism arose within a few years of the popularisation of photography,” Hockney surmises. “Picasso and Braque saw the flaw in photography which I’ve only recently begun to appreciate – the flaw in the camera; but in doing so, they also realised the flaw in photography’s precursor, the camera obscura. Now, the camera obscura was essentially a room – camera means room – it had a hole in it, and the hole was a window. Your looking out a window, that was the idea. In fact, that’s why you get easel painting, which arose around the same time: the resultant canvas was meant to be a kind of window you could slot into your own wall. This idea of looking out a window dominated the European aesthetic for three hundred years.

Oriental art never knew the camera obscura, and their art looks out of doors. The difference between a window and a door is you can walk through a door toward what you are seeing. Much oriental art takes the form of a screen which, like a door, stands on the floor. You cannot do that with a window: a window implies a wall, something between you and what you’re looking at. A lot’s been written about the influence of Oriental art during the last half of the nineteenth century – Manet’s appropriation of Japanese motifs, Van Gogh’s use of bold solid colours, Monet’s gleaning of atmospheric perspective, and so forth – but I suspect the Oriental alternative was especially important for the cubists. Because what they were up to, in a word, was breaking that window. Cézanne was getting there: in his still life’s he observed that the closer things are to us, the harder it is for us to place them; they seem to shift  (I explored this with my tea-cup painting). But he still looked through a window at those card players grouped around that cafe table. Whereas, as has often been said, Picasso and Braque wanted to break that window and shove the café table right up to our waist, to make us part of the game.”

Page 26

“Its incredible how deeply imprinted we are with these damn rectangles”, Hockney commented as we looked at one of these early Grand Canyon collages on its cardboard panel. “Everything in our culture seems to reinforce the instinct to see rectangularly – books, streets, buildings, rooms, windows. Sam Francis once told me how odd the American Indian initially found the white settlers: ‘these people who insist on living in rectangular-shaped buildings’. The Indians, you see, lived in a circular world.

Page 30

Ordinarily, the photographer of such a vista [Grand Canyon] has to choose one point of focus, with the result that things closer or farther or to the sides are progressively more out of focus – this, according to Hockney, is another way in which photography falsifies the experience of looking. “Everything we look at is in focus as we look at it”, he explains. “Now, the actual size of the zone the eye can hold in focus at any given moment is relatively small in relation to the wider visual field, but the eye is always moving through that field and the focal point of view, though moving, is always clear.” The experience of this kind of looking is preserved in the collages, where each frame of distant butte or nearby outcropping is in focus and comprises just about as much of the field as the eye itself could hold in focus at any one moment in the real world.

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The cubists had a lot of problems with their edges – sometimes they tried to solve these by creating circular paintings – and its easy to see why: there are no edges to vision, and certainly no rectangular edges.”

Page 32

For Hockney, to stop at some arbitrary middle distance was completely alien to the kind of vision he was now attempting. Looking at those collages of the Grand Canyon, he immediately realised that he had to bring the picture right up to the viewer, that he had to bring the distance right up to his own feet and include the ground right in front of him, as well as the canyon beyond.

But what about bring the picture in further than his feet, right up to his eyeballs and potentially into his own head – if that’s possible.

“Cubism, I realised during those few days,” Hockney continued, “is about our own bodily prescence in the world. It’s about the world, yes, but ultimately about  where we are in it, how we are in it. It’s about the kind of perception a human being can have in the midst of living.”

Hockney’s [photo] collages, like cubism, are a record of human looking. It is exactly the point that an automatic machine could not possibly have generated them.

Form this point on, Hockney usually included photos of his own feet in these collages. In effect, they stood in for him; they planted him as they plant any subsequent viewer. Indeed, standing there, facing forward into the world before them, the world of vision, these feet seem transposed figures for the eyes themselves. (Explored in my Brain Painting). Several of the Grand Canyon collages are huge and spectacular, long banners of looking made up of prints. The horizon line curves, but not as in the artificial distortion caused by wide-angle lenses; rather, the gentle swell seems to suggest the curvature of the earth: even more to the point, it replicates the actual movement involved in looking at a long horizon line, how, as Hockney points out, “your head starts out low, looking far to the side, then rises slowly on the neck just as it moves towards that part of the horizon directly before you, falling again as it moves on to the other side”. (I think this curve of looking in panorama happens in my wider perspective picture).

Page 37

These and countless other photocollages of this middle period constitute an exploration of how people are couched in space and how that space is couched in time, the time of looking. The viewer, looking, experiences a living relationship, in time, and yet it’s a strangely unreciprocated one: the people in the picture, suspended, don’t quite live back at us. It was this fixity that Hockney, by mid-December, would be seeking to shatter.

We’ve seen so many photos of blurs that we now think we actually see them in the world. But look sometime: you don’t.

(I say that the bottom one doesn’t really count, but then look again, for those two wineglasses both establish a sense of conviviality and Hockney’s own presence at the table and give a wider sense of spaciousness, grounding the whole scene. Block out that print with your hand and you will see all that gets lost.)

Page 38

The rock garden at the Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto, for example, the subject of several drawings by Hockney during earlier trips to Japan, became on this trip the site for further research into the dissolution of the rectangle. “What I began to realise in putting some of these recent ones together,” Hockney explained as we looked at the first two studies of the Ryoanji rock garden, “is that it’s solid, so matter what shape, that constitutes the rectangle and constrains like the rectangle. You have to open it up, put holes in the middle, and stretch bands off to the side to get away from the window aesthetic.”

Page 40

In his second collage of the rock garden of Ryoanji, Hockney decided to attempt movement in his point of view. Almost all of his collages up to this point had presupposed a fixed vantage point, a still center from which viewing took place (even if, as in the case of the Polaroid’s, this fixed point was sometimes an elaborate fiction). Now he was beginning to wonder how he might account for his own movement in the world, as well as that of his subjects. So he got up and he began walking along the white curbstones skirting one side of the rectangular garden. Every couple of steps, he’d stop, face the garden, and take a row of shots extending from the space at his feet all the way back to the yellow wall. Then he’d move on a few steps and repeat the procedure. The resultant collage proved to be a nearly perfect rectangle yet had nothing whatsoever to do with the window aesthetic. “In fact,” Hockney noted as we looked at this second collage, “the only time you actually see rectangles in the world as truly rectangular is when you’re moving in relation to them. Otherwise, they always present themselves as at least slightly foreshortened in some way”. To underline his movement, Hockney included a row of shoes at the bottom of this collage detailing his feet advancing forward, one step at a time, red sock then black sock then red sock, forming a rhythmic, seemingly Oriental pattern.

Page 42   

This luncheon was to prove the occasion for what maybe Hockney’s most successfully integrated photocollage to date. In it all of the artists ambitions are realised simultaneously: the depiction of real space and real time, the rendering of people in the fullness of their living, the breaking of the rectangle.

…Hockney has found a way to suggest the peripheralness of peripheral vision.  

Page 44



With these late collages, Hockney was becoming increasingly interested in the depiction of movement through space – not just the movement of peoples heads, and limbs as they sat talking but rather their movement as they walked, the movement of cars and trains, and his own movement, walking or driving through the field of vision. In one collage taken from the bridge over a narrow canal in Tokyo, for example, the traffic on the road gets minced into dozens of narrow, clipped details – car windows, fenders, hoods, headlights. This noisy jumble of traffic plays off against the imperturbable vertical of the telephone poles, and details from the same cars seem to move forward in a stuttering progression from one frame to the next. Similarly, as Gregory looks out of the window of a train moving through suburban Tokyo, he seems to be surveying a sprawling city: it takes a moment to realise that most of this “city” is made up of the same houses, seen over and over again, at different distances as the train rolls by, and that this sleight of collage is one of the things that gives this piece its internal sense of movement.

The movie must have appeared to be the most vivid and accurate depiction of reality possible – it seemed to address many of the same concerns as cubism (the need to include time, for instance), so that many artists just gave up the terrain of depiction and took off on this journey toward abstraction. The problem, though, is that the movie too is flawed. For one thing, were back with the camera obscura – now all of us literally sit inside the dark room, staring through the rectangular hole in the wall. Furthermore, a movie must traffic in literal time and can only go forward. Even when it pretends to go back, the spool is moving forward, forcing us to keep to an established, dictated pace. There’s no time for looking, as there always is in the world.

Page 46-47  

On my way into the building I ran into a friend on the way out. I asked how shed liked the show [of photcollages at the Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York City]. “You want to know the truth?” she replied. “At first I was really liking it a whole lot but within about ten minutes I ended up fleeing in terror: it was too much like being in somebody else’s eyeballs.” (Brain Painting)

Page 49

“What’s at stake for me in this work [photocallages],” he insisted, “is the revitalization of depiction. The great misinterpretation of twentieth-century art is the claim advanced by many people, especially critics, that cubism of necessity led to abstraction, that cubism’s heritage was this increasing tendency toward a more and more insular abstraction. But on the contrary, cubism was about the real world. It was an attempt to reclaim a territory for figuration, for depiction. Faced with the claim that photography had made figurative painting obsolete, the cubists performed an exquisite critique of photography: they showed that there were certain aspects of looking – basically the human  reality of perception – that photography couldn’t convey, and that you still needed the painters hand and eye to convey them.

…I suspect that it’s because sitting there in Paris back in the early 1910’s, playing out the various possibilities in their minds, they [Picasso, Braque..etc] could already see that abstraction led into a cul-de-sac, eventually even just an empty room, and they didn’t need to do it to find out.  

“I mean, the urge to depict and the longing to see depictions is very strong and very deep within us. It’s a five-thousand-year-old longing – you see it all the way back to the cave paintings, this need to render the real world. We don’t create the world. Its Gods world, he made it. We depict it, we try to understand it. And a longing like that doesn’t just disappear in one generation. Art is about correspondences – making connection with the world and with each other. Its about love in that sense – that is the origin of the erotic quality of art. We love to study images of the world, and especially images of people, our fellow creatures. And the problem with abstraction, finally, is that it goes too far inwards and the links become tenuous, or dissolve, and it becomes too hard to make those connections. You end up getting these claims by some of the formalist critics that art just isn’t for everybody – but that’s ridiculous.

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….for painting to go forward, we have to go back to cubism. It still has very important lessons left to teach us.”

Page 51  

“More true to life. I mean, one’s own eye doesn’t hang out of one’s face, monocular, drooping at the end of some long tube. No, it’s nestled in it’s socket, rolling about, free and responsive. And I feel a camera should be as much like that as possible.”

Page 52

The camera, though people think it sees everything in front of it, cannot see the main thing we get excited about in front of us, which is space. The camera cannot see it. Only human beings maybe, or anyway only living beings, can see space. That’s part of what I was exploring with all those photocollages: how a camera might be transformed to convey space after all, which means how it might be forced to acknowledge time. But it’s only just now that I’ve been returning to my initial insight, which is how good a camera is at conveying a flat surface and the possibilities which that particular effectiveness might afford.

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If you’re taken very, very seriously, you run the risk of becoming bogged down in another direction, which I wouldn’t like. One’s freer this way. I mean, I take my work seriously, I don’t take myself too seriously, but if you spend your whole life doing it, you’re obviously taking it seriously in a way. You don’t choose to do all that work as a mere dalliance, as nothing at all.”

Page 57

…it’s always about something else, something bigger. All of this work is undertaken in a spirit of research. I’m not so much interested in the mere objects I’m creating as in where their taking me, and all the work in all the different media is part of that inquiry and part of that search”

Page 61

Ever since his remarkable debut as an artist in the late fifties, Hockney’s work had been characterized by a youthful zest, a fresh sense of freedom, a playfulness. I started to make this point, but Hockney interrupted me. “If it isn’t playful, it’s nothing. Without play, we wouldn’t be anywhere. Play is incredibly important; its deeply serious as well. Its hardly a criticism of my work to call it playful; on the contrary, its flattering!”

So I made my painting [Kerby], although at the time I did it, I did not yet realize what that painting was all about. It took me almost ten years to understand how, for instance, the reverse perspective in the foreground, far from being a mistake, gives the image greater reality”.

Page 64

….the principle point, I suppose, is that the major problem with traditional perspective, as it was developed in fifteenth-century European painting and persists to this day in the approach of most standard photography, is that is stops time. For perspective to be fixed, time has stopped and hence space has become frozen, petrified. Perspective takes away the body of the viewer. You have a fixed point, you have no movement; in short, you are not there, really. That is the problem. Photography hankers after the condition of the neutral observer. But there can be no such thing as a neutral observer. For something to be seen, it has to be looked at by somebody, and any true and real depiction should be an account of the experience of that looking. In that sense it must deeply involve an observer whose body somehow has to be brought back in.”

Page 66

“…quantum physics is something way outside my ordinary understanding or involvement, but I quickly found incredible connections with the sorts of things I was concerned about. For instance, in the old Newtonian view of the world, in Newtonian physics, it’s as if the world exists outside of us. Its over there, out there, it works mechanically (like a camera), and it will do so with or without us. In short, were really not part of nature; it virtually comes to that. Whereas modern physics has increasingly thrown that model into question and shown how it cannot be. Mr. Einstein makes things more human by making measurement at least relative to us, or anyway, to some observer; the supposedly neutral viewpoint is obliterated. There can be no measurement without the measurer. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is, of course, highly technical and specialized. It deals with a paradox in particle physics, showing how if you attempt to measure the velocity of a given particle you wont be able its exact location and vice versa. Previous to this, of course, science believed that given enough technical advancement, it would eventually be able to measure anything, but Heisenberg that this was not just a problem of not yet having the right measuring devices but that the problem was inherent in the nature of physical reality itself. The old conception of scientific enquiry had gone on as though we could measure the world as if we weren’t in it. Heisenberg showed that the observer, in effect, affects that which he is observing, so that some of those old borders and boundaries begin to blur, just as they do in cubism.  

Page 68

“The notion that the one who thinks (the Ego) is at least in principal separate from and independent of the reality that he thinks about,” Bohm writes (and Hockney read), “is, of course, firmly embedded in our ….tradition….General experience…along with a great deal of …scientific knowledge…suggests…that such a division cannot be maintained consistently”.

Page 68-69

“You can see why I was so excited,” [Hockney] said. “This insistence on the need to break down borders, to entertain the interconnectedness of things and of ourselves with things: the notion that is science today it is no longer possible to have ideas about reality without taking our own consciousness into account. And beyond that, just the language, which Bohm shares with a lot of other physicists. They’re always talking about ‘overall world view’, the need for ‘new horizons’, or ‘wider perspectives’ or ‘a new picture of reality’ – all these visual metaphors which a painter of pictures can understand and which have relevance for how he thinks about his own pictures. There’s that famous phrase of Gombrich’s about the triumph of Renaissance perspective – ‘We have conquered reality’ – which has always seemed to me such a Pyrrhic victory, again, as if reality were somehow separate from us and the world now hopelessly dull because everything was known and accounted for. These physicists, by contrast, were suggesting a much more dynamic situation, and I realized how deeply what they were saying had to do with how we depict the world, not what we depict but the way we depict it.   

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Science is moving toward art, not art toward science…scientists and artists have all kinds of things to say to each other now.

-          Irwin working with scientist

He read another long passage [from The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, by Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr.] in which Edgerton started out by suggesting that the invention of linear perspective had been partly responsible for setting the context in which Newtonian physics could both flourish and then, with the invention of progressively more “complex machinery” (also made possible in part by the existence of linear perspective), be superseded by “the new era of Einsteinian outer space.” Edgerton concluded by predicting that this new era might one day come to invalidate linear perspective itself: “Surely in some future century,” Hockney read, “when artists are among those journeying throughout the universe, they will be encountering and endeavouring to depict experiences impossible to understand, let alone render, by the application of a suddenly obsolete linear perspective.”

“A lot of good stuff there,” [Hockney said]. “The reason I laughed, though, is that last paragraph. I mean, I guess I hold with Buckminster Fuller’s comment, you know, when as an old man he was asked if he was sorry that he would never live long enough to experience travel in outer space and he replied, ‘Sir, we are in outer space.’ The idea that outer space is over there and we’re not part of it is silly. We’re already journeying throughout the universe. …transport is not going to take us to the edge of the universe, though an awareness in our heads might. Transport wont be able to do it; its like relying on buses. But the Einseinian revolution, like the cubist, has already done it. Now we just have to open our eyes and see.”  

Page 70

…it [The Principles of Chinese Painting, by George Rowley] was an attack on perspective – it was all about the spectators being in the picture, not outside it – an attack on the window idea, that Renaissance notion of the paintings being as if slotted onto a wall, which I’d always felt implied the wall and hence separation from the world. The Chinese landscape artists, with their scrolls, had found a way to transcend that difficulty. In my own photocollages, some of the ones Id done on my trip to Japan earlier that year, I’d been pushing the notion of the observer’s head swivelling about in a world which was moving in time. But I’d really only just begun to try and deal with how to portray movement of the observers’ whole body across space. And that’s precisely what these Chinese landscape artists had mastered, according to Rowley.

Page 71 - 72

“Wasn’t it Ruskin who’d just said a couple of generations earlier that there wasn’t a piece of art in the whole of Africa outside Egypt?...Well, obviously Picasso didn’t think so. Everything outside Europe now began to have a major influence on the trajectory of European art. They saw a fresher way, a way of making the observer participate more. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, with that strange evocation of those African masks, draws you into the picture: you as the observer have to start doing things to reconstruct the space. You are getting a more vivid depiction of the experience of reality. And yes, for me, those Chinese scrolls at that moment helped me clear to a new way of constructing such experience into my own work.
Page 74

Hockney, A Visit with Chris and Don, Santa Monica Canyon, 1984

…I was trying to create a [A Visit with Chris and Don] painting where the viewer’s eye could be made to move in certain ways, stop in certain places, move on, and in so doing, reconstruct the space across time for itself. I was combining lessons from both the Chinese scrolls and my study of cubism. I mean, unlike the scrolls these were going to be large images meant to be seen all at once, but the thing was, what I was aiming for was that in another sense they wouldn’t be able to be seen all at once after all. They were filled with incident, but whenever you focused on any single detail everything else blurred into a sort of complex abstraction of shapes and colours, and the image as a whole was always primarily abstraction. This sense of multiple simultaneous perspectives was something I’d, of course, honed during my work on the photocollages.

Page 74-75

...the photocollage of Walking in a Zen garden, from 1983. It was the most radical one up to that point, and it’s the most radical one in the Cameraworks volume. Id first done that earlier version of sitting in a Zen garden, where the sense of perspective was very strong – the rectangle of the rock garden almost read like a triangle, the perspectival V was so strong. And I started gnawing on this question of how one might present the garden as the rectangle it actually was. I mean, in drawing it would have been easy, and I suppose that with a camera one could have rented a helicopter and shot it from above looking down, but any picture you got that way would have mainly been about being in a helicopter, and I wanted to do something about the rectangular quality of this garden. And then it dawned on me that if I moved along the length of the rim of the garden and snapped a row of shots every few steps, scanning from my feet on upward toward the far rim, Id eventually be able to solve my problem. And as you know, when I got back to L.A. and had the shots developed and assembled the collage, I grew very excited. My first thought was that Id made a photograph without perspective. Comparing it with the earlier collage of sitting in a Zen garden, this one of walking seemed to me truer, not the truth, but truer. And I also realized that with this one the viewer was moving through space.

Page 77

Hockney,The Desk, July 1st 1984. Photocollage



Hockney continued looking up at the poster of The Desk. “The thing about reverse perspective is…” he began and then paused. “I mean, my argument has always been that in traditional perspective infinity is a long way away and you can never meet up with it. Whereas if you reverse perspective, infinity is everywhere and you are part of it. There’s a vast difference in the two viewpoints, a totally different way of looking at the world. You haven’t just reversed a little game, you’ve reversed a whole attitude toward life and physical reality.

“Furthermore,” he continued, “the traditional Renaissance way is by no means the natural one. You have to be rigorously trained into accepting its conventions; the misperceptions have to be drilled into you. Look at how a child draws a house – you get the front, the sides, the back, the backyard tree, everything all jumbled together – and then the teacher comes and says, ‘Wrong, wrong. You can’t see all those things at once. Do it this way instead.’ But in a sense the child is right in the first place; his version was more alive, and the teachers is a more impoverished rendition.  

Page 79

…you begin to realize what edges do: they’re not just showing us things; they’re cutting off far more than they’re showing us. The edge is the problem. It’s the major problem we have to deal with. I mean, it will always be there, but it can be softened with different ways of looking, a more complex image, and that’s what we now need to do.

Page 80

The world of painting no longer has to get out to reach the observer, because the observer has gone in. – Weschler

Page 80

“In Pearblossom Highway,” Hockney now commented, “which is far and away the most complex and the most successful of the photocollages I’ve done so far – […] - the results are quite powerful, I think, in the sense that you’re deeply aware of the flat surface but at the same time you start making a space in your head. And yet the space is not the illusionistic kind where you feel, ‘Oh, I could walk into that,’ which is the old type of illusion and sort of a cheat or a contradiction anyway. You’re saying ‘Oh, I could walk into that,’ – only if you tried, you’d kill yourself or you’d hurt yourself anyway; you’d be walking into a brick wall. No, here you don’t feel you need to walk into it because you’re already in it.  

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Hockney, Pearblossom Hwy - 11-18th April 1986 (Second Version), 1986. Photocollage