David Hockney
Painting vs Photography
- Hockney was both a painter and photographer.
- He believed photography is a “deficient art not equivalent to painting.”
- “Photography is just one viewpoint, and there is never just one viewpoint—there are always thousands of viewpoints. Photographs are not real or that good. To think the highest we will get with reality is photography is naive.”
The Way We See and the Way the Camera Sees
- The way we see is not from one viewpoint since we have two eyes. When we turn our heads one way or another, we see the object from many different vantage points.
- You can’t do this with a camera, which has only “one eye.”
- The camera is a “paralyzed one eyed cyclops”.
- A way to get around this is to combine multiple single photographs to create a cubist image— “joiners.”
Joiners
- Hockney created Joiners which allow your eye to move through a sceen much like you do in real life.
- Hockney uses different Photographs of one subject from different angels and combines them together “Joiners”
- It created a story, as if the viewer was moving through the image.
- His work has inspired by Cubism
- Cubism is when objects are broken up and reassembled in an abstracted form
- The artist depicts a subject from a multitude of viewpoints
- Cubism is when objects are broken up and reassembled in an abstracted form
How he photographed Pearblossom Hwy
- Most famous work is of a California Highway in the 1980’s
- 700 photographs that were pieced together to create one large work
- The completed artwork didn’t just show the highway in one image,
- Showed the viewer the highway as seen by Hockney’s multiple different perspectives.
Composite Polaroids
- Hockney uses a numbers of Polaroid photos of a single subject and combines them together like a patchwork.
Fun Fact for McElfish who loves Daschounds:
David Hockney has painted hundreds of portraits of his Dachshunds Stanley and Boodgie as they nap and play. “I make no apologies for the apparent subject matter…these two dear little creatures are my friends,”
