David Hockney is an English painter born in 1937 who is most famous for his many landscapes and portraits while living in Los Angeles. A prolific painter and one of the most successful of the twentieth century, he remains as active and relevant as he did when he first came to popularity in the 1960’s.
As a lifelong student of looking at the world, he also put forward a theory on the early use of the camera, known as the camera lucida, in the paintings of the old masters dating all the way back to the Renaissance. Through the early use of the camera came forth the idea of the single point of view that dominated not only western painting but also guided the development of photography and videography.
Through these studies, Hockney illustrates the limited and hegemonic way of seeing imposed by photography that was inherited from the Renaissance and exists today in the cinematography of movies and shows. This is the tradition of seeing from a single point of view captured through the all-powerful lens of perspective. If we take a step back, this is not how we normally see since our eyes are always moving, looking at various points in our surroundings. Nothing goes completely out of focus with natural sight and there is no single perspective but rather a multiplicity of perspectives. Chinese scroll paintings or the drawings of Escher which allow the eye to wander throughout the picture are a better representation of what our eyes are really doing in the natural world.
To illustrate this take a look at two examples. The first is Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper which is perhaps the greatest expression of single pointed perspective. Everything recedes into a distant focal point which is centered on the head of Jesus as can be see in the image below that draws in the line perspective used to create the painting.
In his notebook, da Vinci states, “The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror” before laying out the three branches of perspective:
the diminution in the distinctness of the forms of the objects;
the diminution in their magnitude;
the diminution in their color.1
In other words, the discovery of perspective in art was the recognition that things get more blurred, smaller, and fade in color as they get further away from the viewer. The ability to articulate and represent this in art was one of the defining features that separated Renaissance art from the two dimensional art and iconography of the Middle Ages which is similar to art from other cultures.
To contrast this idea of perspective we turn to the second example, a seventy-two-foot-long seventeenth-century Chinese scroll painted by Wang Hui. Hockney devoted a whole film to discuss the stories the are enveloped in the picture and how the scroll differs from the way of showing the world in the western painting tradition.
Even in the tiny image below you can see that the color scheme is the same, the blue cloaks appear blue throughout. All the figures are the same size no matter where they are in the picture and the level of detail for each figure is the same. In other words, this picture does not adhere to any of the laws of perspective proposed by da Vinci.
Well so what? Doesn’t this reinforce the narrative of progress and how the discovery of perspective in the Renaissance anticipated the discovery of the law of science and the modern world? Perhaps, but it also captures a prescientific way of seeing that, according to Hockney, is a more true representation of how we see in our everyday world. In this picture, focus on the people on the bridge, then look at one of the sail boats, then go to the marketplace and the people huddling around one of the shops. There are literally a thousand different scenes in this one picture. There is no unified scene or one narrative other than the hustle and bustle of a day on the grand canal with the Chinese Emperor, which is the title of the scroll.
Although critical of the dominance of perspective as a single point of view, Hockney is no enemy of using technology as a medium to see and capture the world. His return to his native England in 2003 coincided with the start of using the iPhone to create digital art. When the iPad came out in 2010 David Hockney decided to use it for a series called The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011.
The piece at the top of this article is one of his iPad drawings, part of a series of 50 works that were exhibited at the Royal Academy. Even in this picture, where a road recedes into the distance you can see the multiple perspectives at work. There is no real focal point. The eye may first be drawn to the bright pink road in the foreground, or perhaps the white flowers on either side of the road, or maybe the bright green leaves of mid-Spring hanging over the road in multiple shapes and patterns.
Instead of gazing on the whole work, Hockney’s work invites the viewer to look around the picture and find different color relationships and patterns, transparent strokes and doodlings that come together to form the picture of a little road on May 31, 2011 in Yorkshire, England.
He made another series iPad drawings in 2020 called the Arrival of Spring in Normandy and you can even download a free app called Hockney AR that provides an Augmented Reality of this show.
To create his digital paintings Hockney used the Brushes App which you can still download today. I’ve shared a few of my own paintings using the app. This app provides a great way to start painting outside without having to buy and learn all the materials associated with traditional oil or water color painting.
I’ll post some instruction videos on using the app and let readers know when it is available. The next phase of Innerstice will be to incorporate more of these digital interfaces within the app itself with the same goal of opening our senses to the world outside. More of that to come later…
Leonardo’s Notebooks, Writing and Art of the Great Master, ed. H. Anna Suh, 2005.