"If you want to replenish your visual thinking, you have to go back to nature.." DAVID HOCKNEY
"Lots of people tell me that I made them look at trees again... Trees are like an individual person - all the leaves are different, all the snowflakes are different -- everything is in Nature" NGV Video
As Britain’s most revered living artist, Hockney has broken new ground throughout his long and distinguished career, in painting, film and as a set designer for the leading opera houses of the world. In his monumental exhibitions that tour leading museums and art galleries, he continues to challenge global audiences, to refresh their view of Nature through paintings, video and digital drawings. He inspires contemporary artists to return to Nature. According to Hockney,
"If you want to replenish your visual thinking, you have to go back to nature."
In his recent blockbuster exhibition, entitled ‘CURRENT’ he offers us just that; an intense experience of Nature, its complexity and beauty as a 21st century multi-layered experience of art, as paintings on walls and images on screens – ipads and i-phones.
He not only connects us with Nature but he also challenges us to be conscious of our 21st century ways of seeing the world.
"Lots of people tell me that I made them look at trees again... Trees are like an individual person - all the leaves are different; all the snowflakes are different -- everything is in Nature"
Hockney defines it as the 'Kinship with Nature' principle, celebrated in his monumental landscapes of Yorkshire and Yosemite - where he immerses us at once in both the grandeur and abundance and the minute detail of nature. We are simultaneously drawn into close-up and panoramic views and he arrests us with dramatic qualities of light with intensely vivid colors.
At the National Gallery of Victoria exhibition is Melbourne recently Hockney used film, digital imaging, iphones and ipads - every medium available to him in the 21st century.
Hockney has always contested the conventions of perspective throughout art history - the Renaissance linear perspective, the camera-obscura of Vermeer and the Dutch painters, the ‘plein-air’ of the Impressionists, the multi-perspectives of Cubism, and the frozen "realism" of photography. Drawing, he says, “was going out of fashion.” By resurrecting it on ipad he taps into the new visual perspectives of contemporary screen culture and taps into a new generation of audiences.
"All flat images of the world around us, and the people, creatures, plants and things to be found in them, share a basic kinship because they face the same problems. Consequently, all images - drawings, paintings, prints, photographs, films, television, belong to a single category and have a common history."
As a master painter of the 21st century, David Hockney has acquired a wisdom learnt from life and Nature. Like biologist and theorist Edward O. Wilson, who articulated the theory of ‘biophilia’, Hockney immerses himself in the biosphere, its beauty and complexity, and tinkers with his theories on visual perspectives.
His vivid landscapes, in particular, offer us an intense experience of nature, its complexity and beauty, in a way that challenges us in this 21st century to connect with nature and to be conscious of our 21st century ways of seeing the world.
Hockney has always contested the conventions of perspective throughout art history - the Renaissance linear perspective, the camera-obscura of Vermeer and the Dutch painters, the ‘plein-air’ of the Impressionists, the multi-perspectives of Cubism, and the frozen "realism" of photography. Drawing, he says, “was going out of fashion.” By resurrecting it on ipad he taps into the new visual perspectives of contemporary screen culture and taps into a new generation of audiences.
"All flat images of the world around us, and the people, creatures, plants and things to be found in them, share a basic kinship because they face the same problems. Consequently, all images - drawings, paintings, prints, photographs, films, television, belong to a single category and have a common history."
