Hockney and his 'Brushes'.

What I like most about this recent article on David Hockney's new exhibition is this line about Bridlington UK, where he now lives: " His enthusiasm for the area is obvious, as he says that he wants to 'make it as exciting as the Grand Canyon. It's the way you look at things that counts.'" As a landscape painter I agree entirely. It is wrong to think there is a hierarchy of landscape with some places and some subjects outweighing others, and poor practice to try and chase some kind of prize landscape which has all the right elements: soaring mountains, wide horizons, peaceful seas treated reverentially with atmospheric perspective. This results in the kind of trite paintings which wound up in Komar and Melamid. 


The problem is that most subjects in the landscape are going to be familiar to most viewers; there are few surprises is seeing what is always around us. Hockney's use of iPad apps help achieve something quite fresh looking. The digital constraints of the iPad instantly add a level of abstraction which would be difficult to find if one stuck solely to pencil sketching or oil sketching. In the above image, the foreground would end up very differently if painted from an oil sketch. I admire Hockney for not trying to 'fix' the digital palette by making it more traditionally tonal when painting up his 'sketches'. The path on the right floats uncomfortably, is it above or below the grass. He is defying drawing here! His combining of digital and analog is exciting. Is painting dead? It used to be fashionable to say so, it won't be anymore.