The Bigger Splash, an iconic image, and undoubtedly one of my favourites. BBC has a documentary on the man himself which is available on iplayer at the moment. It follows him over a period of three years, and though I’ve never looked into Mr Hockney himself, this was inexplicable; I didn’t expect to find it so indelibly captivating.  The best part is probably that he doesn’t talk a lot of…crap that does seem to come from some artists. It is on its simplest level, him looking at the world around him and making something of it on a canvas (or many many many canvasses). Over and over again, going from the basics of sketchbook work, working towards great big paintings spanning giant walls.

Though he amasses tonnes of paintings of the Yorkshire landscape, and also states at the beginning that he doesn’t want to “look through the camera anymore”, he returns to it, and indeed his work is a kind of response to the fact that he doesn’t feel the camera can capture in the way a painting can.  It is a point of  constant fascination and argument for him, and very relevant to artists now.

I was so inspired by this, and not just because of the ethics of his work, but because this man can talk!! I was pausing every few minutes to write down what he was saying. I had so many quotes, but these are some of my favourite.

“Well in your head you can go anywhere, didn’t you know that? Why, you can even go to the edge, the very edge of the universe in your head! You’ll never get there on the bus or the spaceship or whatever they think of…”

Interviewer: What do you like about it?
DH: I shall paint it!

“He’s taken up painting as an extreme sport”

 “… It’s ok for television to say we’re a window on the world, but you’re not connected with it, you want more than that- actually you want to be in it.”

“I’m painting landscapes of Yorkshire because you can’t photograph them. The camera can’t get the beauty of this. It just can’t get the space; the thrilling space that I’m in. We’ve simply got to a point where we think the camera can photograph anything at all well it can’t really. No it can’t compete with painting at all.”

 Available for a while still! Go watch!
BBC iplayer DAVID HOCKNEY
“As Hockney approaches the age of 70, he re-invents his painting from scratch, working through the seasons and in all weathers out in the Yorkshire countryside, ending up with the largest picture ever made outdoors. It is at once the story of an unusual homecoming and also an intimate portrait of what inspires Hockney as his time runs out.”