David Hockney: My Yorkshire

Anyone who has browsed the most-read posts on this blog will know that I am a fan of David Hockney’s recent Yorkshire paintings, as seen in the exhibitions at Salt’s Mill last year and, currently, the Royal Academy.  But I have to admit I was a tad disappointed with David Hockney: My Yorkshire Conversations with Marco Livingstone that I have just read, courtesy of the embattled Wirral library service.

The book consists of conversations between Hockney and Marco Livingstone who has written extensively on Hockney and co-curated the current Royal Academy exhibition, A Bigger Picture.  It’s a lovely book to look at – produced in A4 landscape format with reproductions of many of the paintings from the RA exhibition on good quality paper, with several of the larger paintings printed across double A4 fold-out spreads.

Where the book disappoints, for me, is in the text.  Livingstone has chosen to transcribe verbatim several conversations he had with Hockney during the period when he was engaged in his painterly exploration of the Yorkshire Wolds, producing the huge paintings of trees and rolling landscapes through the seasons that culminated in the RA exhibition.  Unfortunately, these conversations are not, for the most part, particularly revealing.  Hockney is often rather opaque and contradictory when expressing his well-known views on, for example photography and art; and Livingstone’s prompts often fail to push Hockney to clarify his meaning.  All in all, these conversations are nowhere near as revealing or interesting as those that form the basis of Martin Gayford’s excellent A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney.

The issue of Hockney’s attitude to photography keeps recurring in his discussions with Livingstone, particularly with reference to the controversial argument he articulated in The Secret Knowledge, that advances in realism and the accuracy of representation in art since the Renaissance were primarily the result of optical aids such as the camera obscura, camera lucida, and curved mirrors, rather than being primarily due to greater artistic skill. What can be confusing is that, on the one hand Hockney insists on the importance of photographic technology, whilst at the same time speaking of photography being finished and presenting a flat and restricted view of the world.  In this respect he often talks of his return to landscape painting in Yorkshire in the late 1990s, first in watercolours and then in oil paintings, as his ‘photographic detox’; yet, at the same time the recent period of work in Yorkshire has also seen a return to photography with his experiments with nine-camera arrays.

Hockney does, indeed, admit to being contradictory:

Well, I go hot and cold about things.  I’m interested in images.  I’m interested in how images were made in the past.   .. If you’re interested in images, you’re interested in the photograph as well; it’s an image.  So I’ve always been interested in photography, but I’ve always thought it was not that good a way to make pictures.  I see now it’s because the camera isn’t used right, and all my criticism has always been this: it was always the same, ‘Well, use the camera another way’.

Livingstone begins, though, by taking Hockney back to the time when he first became aware of the Wolds:

I would have been 14, I think.  1952. In the summers of 1952 and 1953, when I was at Bradford Grammar School, I worked on a farm between Wetwang and Huggate, stooking corn, as a schoolboy.  I had a bicycle, of course that was the only way you could get around here, and I cycled around, all over…

There were no paintings of the Wolds then: working ‘long, long days’, from 7 in the morning to 7:30 at night; ‘but I was aware that I was in a lovely space. Those fields are still there.  You get wonderful views.  I do react to space, I am very aware of that.’  Later, in the 1980s, his brother went to live in Flamborough, and later still his sister moved to Bridlington, followed by his mother.  When his mother was in her nineties Hockney visited her regularly in Bridlington, and began exploring the Wolds.  Then, in 1996, when Jonathan Silver, his great friend and developer of Salt’s Mill in Saltaire, was dying of cancer, Hockney for the first time stayed over in Yorkshire for six months or more and began painting the Wolds.  He was driving every day from Bridlington to Wetherby to see Jonathan, and every day he was travelling up and down Garrowby Hill.  He made some drawings, and after Jonathan died, back in Los Angeles, he did the wonderful Garrowby Hill painting.

After Hockney returned to settle in Yorkshire, the first paintings he did were watercolours.  He speaks of the discipline of working with watercolours:

Watercolour has to discipline you in the sense that there are certain methods.  For instance, you have to paint from light to dark in watercolour.  In oil painting you can do what you want.  I liked the disciple of it;  the discipline is making you do things.

Soon, though, he was painting in oils and excited about the possibilities of painting compared to photography.  He became deeply aware that we ‘see with memory’:

None of us see the same thing.  No matter what we are looking at.  When I am looking at anything now, it’s now.  Memory is also now.  When I am looking at you, I have memories of you before.  Someone who has never seen you before doesn’t, so they see something different.  That’s what I’m saying.  That’s true of everything.  The landscape, where you are.  I became rather fascinated with this, especially when you are watching seasons change; the same trees change.  Because you have the memory of last winter, but you are seeing more this winter. ‘I didn’t notice that last winter’.  The first winter, I didn’t notice how all the branches were reaching for the light, especially in December, that’s when they stand up the straightest.  You don’t notice that until you’ve been around a while or looked at them.  This was also linking it with memory.

Three Trees near Thixendale, Winter 2007

Hockney tells Livingstone how he went about painting the trees near Thixendale (a sequence of three observed at each season).  The paintings were based on observation, rather than photographs:

We took some photographs, but they were all flat to me, and I am painting spatial feelings.  With those trees, the first time I decided it was a subject was August 2006.  I thought I’d do them in August, because they looked so majestic to me.  I realized they were about 200 years old each.  There were a lot of things about them. … Once you spend the winters here, you realize that every tree is different.  Every single one.  The branches, the forces in it, they are marvellously different. […]

They are like faces , they are.  Especially in the winter.  They are not skeletons, either.  They are very, very living; a skeleton isn’t.  So you come to see that a tree, after all, is the largest plant form we know.  It’s also a kind of physical manifestation of the life force, and we can see and feel that. … Van Gogh was thrilled by that, the infinity of nature, the never-ending variety.

William Carlos Williams was on the same wavelength:

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.
– ‘Winter Trees‘

Three Trees near Thixendale, Summer 2007

The Thixendale Trees – all four paintings – were done entirely in the studio.  Hockney says,  ‘I wanted to use memory, you see.  I had done a lot of hard looking.  I was beginning to get a vocabulary’.  And the paintings got bigger:

What was thrilling was painting from nature on what were quite big canvases – but remember there were six.  It’s unusual to paint on that scale direct from nature.

Later, of course, they got bigger still.

In the second of the two conversations which make up the book, Hockney talks at length about the ideas that lay behind the films he has created using an array of nine video cameras attached to a moving vehicle.  The films form part of the RA exhibition and create the sensation of being in nature and travelling through it.

When I went back to the camera, I didn’t go back to using it like Vermeer, like everybody else does, but I’ve used it as a collage. That’s why I went back to photography.  My critique is more that it doesn’t showyou enough, and that’s why I was bored with it.  So I took it up again to demonstrate that if you use a camera a different way, you can open it up. … A single camera isn’t very good at showing a landscape.  But nine cameras are.

Hockney 'drawing' with images from nine cameras

Towards the end of their conversation, Hockney and Livingstone discuss the new computer technologies that the artist has been using in the last few years – iPhone, iPad and printing directly from drawings created on the computer using Photoshop.  Some of these Photoshop images are reproduced in the book, and, personally, I think they are dreadful.  Onto a background painted by Hockney on the iPad are superimposed what look like superior clip art images of trees.  Nevertheless, Hockney is enthusiastic about the advantages of using a computer for both speed and precision.  He can magnify a small area of the painting temporarily so that he can work on it in detail.

For Hockney, the iPad has taken over as his sketchbook ‘totally’:

Why go back to a sketchbook?  This is terrific. … The iPad is affecting the way I’m painting, because I’m drawing bolder and bolder on it.  My mark-making is becoming bolder and bolder.

For me, the best of the iPad images reproduced in the book is this one, Untitled 12 August 2010:

In one exchange, Marco Livingstone suggests what Hockney’s recent flurry of work might signify:

With all these investigations into forms of picture-making using new technology, you have also managed during the past two years to continue using the very old technology to which you have always been devoted, that of oil painting.  Most of these pictures, including an immense painting on 15 canvases of felled logs, Winter Timber 2009, and a series of hawthorn blossom canvases, were made  in the large warehouse studio rather than from the motif. You call that sudden period of manic flowering in the spring ‘action week’, all the more exciting for its brevity and for your knowledge that a single downpour will bring down most of that delicate blossom. Is that feeling of the brevity of life – and the cycle of birth, death and renewal – particularly poignant to you as you get older? Is it an urgent desire to embrace the vitality of life that you wish to communicate in these pictures?

To which Hockney responds:

Yes, there is a desire to embrace the vitality of life and yes, it becomes more poignant as I get older.  It does for everybody, doesn’t it?  When people are in their twenties, they think they’re immortal, don’t they? When I was 23, after a year at the Royal College of Art, I received a letter from the National Insurance saying that unless I put more stamps on, ‘This could mean four and sixpence less in the pension’. The old-age pension. Well, I was 23: ‘Fuck your fucking pension! … And I thought, Fuck off. I didn’t care. I mean, four and sixpence less, this is in 45 years’ time! What are they going on about?’  Well, you think you’re immortal when you’re 23. You think you’ll never be 63, and I certainly wouldn’t have worried about four and sixpence less. […]

Well, you ponder your own mortality. But when I signed the lease for this huge studio two years ago, the moment I’d signed it I felt 20 years younger. I’d taken it on for five years, renewable to ten. I started planning, and I’m going to tell you, it gives you a lot of energy. I’d recommend it to anybody. I wouldn’t recommend retirement. Retirement isn’t a thing you even think about as an artist, anyway. Anybody who is spending their life doing what they like, any creative artist, continues till they fall over.

I’ll raise a glass to that!

Footnote:

A friend borrowed this book from Wallasey library which, according to the borrowing slip, is managed by Wirral Council’s Department of Regeneration.  Seems something very much of our times about that – books and reading seen only in terms of economic development.  I’m sure Hockney would snort.

David Hockney’s new exhibition at Salt’s Mill

Three days in the Yorkshire Dales being blown and buffeted by the tail winds of Hurricane Katia. On our first evening, in our friends’ caravan in Littondale, there was a power cut for a couple of hours as the wind roared and shook us.

The Canal: embracing boredom

A Banksy by the Regents canal in Camden

One of my favourite bookshops is the one in Salt’s Mill, by the canal in Saltaire.  There are no best-selling celebrity memoirs in sight, instead an excellent range of fiction, art books, poetry, nature writing and more.  But the best thing is that most of the books are displayed flat, covers up, on large display tables.  Most bookshops wouldn’t have the space – but here, in this vast mill, there is room to spread out the wares.

This was where, towards the end of walk along the Leeds-Liverpool canal last summer, and obviously drawn by the title, I found Lee Rourke’s novel, The Canal.  I read it over the Christmas period.

It’s Rourke’s first novel, and it is not a typically English one. It has more in common with existential explorations of alienation by authors such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Albert Camus – who happen to be two of Lee Rourke’s favourite writers. Its central theme is boredom.

I started walking to the canal one day out of boredom. It’s not that I’m particularly fond of canals; I don’t give them much thought usually. I simply awoke one morning and decided, rather than walk to work as normal I’d walk to the canal instead. […]

Some people think that boredom is a bad thing, that it should be avoided, that we should fill our lives with other stuff in order to keep it at bay. I don’t. I think boredom is a good thing: it shapes us; it moves us. Boredom is powerful. It should never be avoided. In fact, I think boredom should be embraced. It is the power of everyday boredom that compels people to do things—even if that something is nothing.

This is the book’s opening: the narrator informing us that one morning, instead of walking to work , he simply walks to the Regent’s canal where:

Along the towpath of the canal, halfway between Hackney and Islington, I stopped at a brown bench … the perfect spot for me to sit, undisturbed; somewhere I could do nothing and simply watch it all go by.

Seated on the bench, he determines to embrace boredom:

It was good sitting there, watching the world go by – saying nothing, doing nothing, thinking nothing.  It was really good … I liked being bored – I liked what it was doing to me.  The word ‘boring’ is usually used to denote a lack of meaning – an acute emptiness.  But the weight of boredom at that precise moment was almost overwhelming; it sure as hell wasn’t empty of anything; it was tangible  -it had meaning.

He returns to the bench every day, and as he sits he expands his thoughts on boredom into a critique of a society in which people are encouraged to turn to vicarious titillation and violence in films, TV shows, drugs and computer games as a way of  trying to beat boredom, rather than just accept it:

A lot of people have attributed boredom to a lack of things to do – this has always confused me.  For me the act of boredom, by its very nature, is doing something … Those who are not bored are merely lost in superfluous activity: fashion, lifestyle, TV, drink, drugs, technology, et cetera – the usual things we use to pass the time. The irony being that they are just as bored as I am, only they think they’re not because they are continuously doing something. And what they are doing is battling boredom, which is a losing battle.

For the unnamed protagonist, the daily act of returning to the canal becomes a statement about the world of work, ambition and routine which is now meaningless to him. As the days pass, seated on his bench, he watches the daily rituals of the deskbound office workers in the building on the far side of the canal. A young woman joins him on the bench.  They converse haltingly, and it slowly realises that her alienation is even more acute than his.

Lee Rourke is one of a group of younger writers, not all British, who have been tagged the Offbeat Generation.  He is the author of a short story collection, Everyday and has written for The Guardian, The Independent, TLS, Observer, and the New Statesman.  Of The Canal, Lee Rourke has written on the Angel website:

I am not the first to explore the symbolism of the canal in literary fiction (and I hope I won’t be the last). The canal, for instance, is integral to the composition of Albert Camus’ The Fall, and Alexander Trocchi’s Young Adam. Both Samuel Beckett (First Love) and Alain Robbe-Grillet (The Erasers) explored the mystery of the canal. It is no coincidences that they are two of my favourite novelist, both influencing my novel in many ways. […]

The Regent’s Canal, just by Shepherdess Walk and Wenlock Basin, near the borders of Islington and Hackney, is a perfect setting for my novel. Not only is it rich in history, both industrial and cultural, but it is still a fascinating place to be, in spite of the overt gentrification we are witnessing along its banks. The canal snakes itself through the city like a forgotten artery, pumping workers, leisure-seekers, vagrants and people with no place to go into the numerous boroughs along its banks. It is a place where you can hide from the city above (I like they way the Regent’s Canal is just below street level), and just watch things as they drift by. Obviously this helps with the writing of the novel, in terms of scene-setting and mood, but it also gives off psychogeographic echoes too – I mean, a hell of a lot of things have happened on that stretch of canal and they all filter in some strange way into the make-up of my novel.

At one point the narrator anticipates the routine arrival of the dredger along his stretch of canal:

I wanted to see them, the dredgers. I wanted to see them in action. I wanted to see what they might find buried in the thick sludge. I got up off the bench and walked to the bank. I peered down. I couldn’t even see my own reflection in the water—let alone what was down there, below the surface.

Rourke’s theme may be boredom, but his novel is far from boring.  Slowly, through an accumulation of encounters, the narrator penetrates the surface of his own life and of other lives – both human and animal – that meet on the canal bank. Although he seeks to embrace his boredom by submitting to it, as the novel unfolds he repeatedly engages with – and resists – cruelty and inhumanity he encounters on the canal bank. The tension in the novel builds palpably, culminating in a terrible act of violence.

I enjoyed the book; Rourke explores the themes of boredom and alienation in pared-down and unpretentious writing which evokes a strong sense of place – what some have called psychogeography.  The only jarring note, perhaps, is that he has chosen as an epigraph for his novel a quotation from Martin Heidegger: ‘We are suspended in dread’.  Bertrand Russell once wrote of Heidegger:

His philosophy is extremely obscure. One cannot help suspecting that language is here running riot. An interesting point in his speculations is the insistence that nothingness is something positive. As with much else in Existentialism, this is a psychological observation made to pass for logic.

While Roger Scruton noted:

His major work Being and Time is formidably difficult—unless it is utter nonsense, in which case it is laughably easy. I am not sure how to judge it, and have read no commentator who even begins to make sense of it.

Thankfully, Lee Rourke’s writing is not beset with the same difficulties.

Here – some videos of Lee Rourke from the Offbeat Generation YouTube channel: