DAVID HOCKNEY ~ The Art of Seeing

Summary

The film follows David Hockney’s return to East Yorkshire, where he has spent years painting the Yorkshire Wolds and the changing landscape around Bridlington. His large-scale paintings, iPad drawings, and multi-screen films explore how close, sustained looking can reveal beauty in ordinary places.

Rather than treating landscape as a fixed view, Hockney emphasizes movement, time, memory, and the viewer’s experience of being within a place.

Artistic Techniques and Creative Processes

• Working from observation: Hockney returns to the same locations repeatedly, watching how light, weather, color, and vegetation change. He argues that understanding a landscape takes time—often more than one season.
• Painting outdoors and at scale: He paints directly in the landscape, sometimes combining multiple canvases to make a larger image. This creates practical challenges, such as reaching across a large canvas while still being able to step back and assess it.
• Showing space and movement: Hockney contrasts the European tradition of landscape as a view through a window with approaches that suggest walking through or moving within a scene. He also explores how a viewer’s eyes and head move across a picture.
• Using photography and collage: His photographic collages, including Pearblossom Highway, arrange multiple images to suggest a more subjective, immersive experience of space than a single camera view.
• Exploring color through careful looking: Hockney studies how colors relate to one another, finding varied greens, pinks, and oranges in scenes that might initially seem dull or gray. He notes that green can be particularly challenging to paint.
• Watercolor methods: Watercolor encourages quick decisions and generally requires working from light to dark, since it is difficult to restore light areas over dark paint. Hockney also uses rubber cement as a resist to preserve areas of the paper.
• Keeping the process visible: He often leaves marks uncovered so the time and labor of making the painting remain visible. He suggests that marks are usually covered when the artist wants to create an illusion.
• Drawing on an iPad: The tablet lets him make quick drawings and establish a subtle range of color, especially for luminous subjects such as sunrises. He considers how an image will look when printed and uses large displays to judge and revise the work.
• Making multi-camera films: Hockney’s team mounts a grid of cameras on a vehicle to record the same scene from several viewpoints. In later arrangements, 18 screens show different moments, inviting viewers to scan the image rather than being directed by a single camera’s frame.
• Designing the exhibition: Hockney planned the Royal Academy show using a model of the galleries, organizing the works to create an overall experience. A large sequence of iPad prints and a wall painting traces the arrival of spring from winter into June.

Hockney’s guiding idea is that art can teach people to look more attentively—wherever they are. He describes painting as requiring the hand, the eye, and the heart, alongside learned craft and practiced skill.

Creators and Contributors Mentioned

• David Hockney — Artist and central subject.
• Jonathan Silver — Hockney’s friend and supporter, who encouraged him to paint Yorkshire and established a gallery for his work at Salts Mill.
• Hockney’s Bridlington team — Assisted with his large-scale painting and multi-camera film projects; individual members are not named.
• Interviewer/narrator — Conducts the interview and commentary; not identified in the subtitles.

The film also refers to the following artists and cultural figures when discussing Hockney’s ideas: John Constable, J. M. W. Turner, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Piet Mondrian, Rembrandt, Lucian Freud, Federico Fellini, John Ruskin, and Wallace Stevens.