David Hockney in Yorkshire

David Hockney made an appearance on BBC’s countryfile this weekend, as the programme spent most of its time in the Yorkshire area. By Heck!

The “greatest living Yorkshireman”! (along with Alan Bennett and Geoffrey Boycott)

As well as a Yorkshire pudding baking contest, and a walk along the wold way, stopping to talk to Land Artist Colin Rose, the programme included a very good item on David Hockney. As a new exhibition is about to open at the Royal Academy the programme interviewed him to explore his recent landscape work inspired by the East Riding of Yorkshire (which just happens to be my birthplace). He has worked from the landscape in pencil and pen, paint, photography, ipad and now film.

The Royal Academy show promises to be a stunning exhibition, including large paintings, large multi-screen films, and ipad-created images. You cannot help but be swept up in his enthusiasm and the tremendous spirit of inquiry and investigation he demonstrates, not just of the landscape but of the ways it can be recorded, through traditional and new forms of technology. I have been reading some books about him recently, mainly interviews with him through the eighties, nineties, noughties, and I have a real sense of an artist engaging afresh with the world around him through emerging technologies, and new approaches to older technologies.

About these ads