Pushing boundaries…again!
Just back from the Hockney at the RA.
Almost every day for a quarter of a year Hockney painted the scenes around his Normandy ‘cottage’ (quite a substantial house, in the pictures) showing the countryside moving from the end of winter to full summer.
Like his Yorkshire hawthorn pictures there is a magical and luminous quality to the work, ‘painted’ en plein air on an iPad – for which he got Apple to programme additional brushes – and very finely printed. It’s an exhibition to put a smile on your face – the paintings may not be challenging – as the Michael Armitage exhibition upstairs is – but they are charming and beautiful.
There is one – with the countryside all misty – for which I cannot imagine how the effect was achieved on a computer.
Hockney (again) is using a wholly new technique (as he did with his overlapping polaroi
ds) to achieve an artistic end. Very booked up, but go if you can.
