The majority of the works on show are his recent large landscape paintings, done in Yorkshire in the last few years, and done on a grand scale using a large number of separate but joined smaller canvases and lots of strong colours. Many have been painted from memory in the studio, although Hockney also uses photographs a lot, and he also does a lot of pointing in situ. Some of the works were lovely, but some looked rather formulaic, a bit child-like even, although I admired the sheer scale of the big landscapes, they capture expansive vistas of the English countryside,
the rolling hills and hedges, and - in spring and summer, anyway - the strong colours. The paintings of the lane near Woldgate Woods were lovely, depicting the changing seasons. and had a lyrical quality in the grandeur of the trees and the perspective of the receding track disappearing into the vanishing point at the end of the lane. Lovely.
His big landscapes also showed off his painting technique - almost like the pointtiliste impressionists - lots of small lines and marks, using bold and unexpected colours - blue in the grass, red in the green of the trees, purple in a tree stump. The build-up of make-making conveyed depth and town and the changing light. Vaguely reminiscent of Van Gogh in places - his fields not unlike the fields in Van Gogh's paintings at Arles.
I liked the much-vaunted paintings of trees and cut timber rather less, possibly because they seemed less subtle, rather coarsely executed. Indeed, the quality of the pairing itself was not always very good - you can see the bare canvas underneath in many places, the paint is almost thrown onto the canvas, all a little slap-dash and hurried.
While the colours in these pairings are stunning, the heavy outlined shapes, and the stylised leaves and grasses, reminded me of cartoon images in kids picture books rather than observed landscape, and i was not sure what Hockney was trying to convey by them.
However, the series of paintings of three magnificent trees in a field, Thixendale Trees, seen at different seasons through the year, were stunning. I also very much liked the charcoal drawing of these trees, from which the pairings were done.
There were a few earlier works, including Mulholland Drive: The road to the Studio (1980) (we lived with a very nice print of this for some years, courtesy of Ken, so I thought how nice it was to see the original).
Except, hey, what's this? It wasn't the original painting after all, but a 'photographic reproduction". Now, that seems a very poor show, to me. Couldn't they have persuaded the Los Angeles gallery to let them borrow the real thing? Or if not, why not show a different real painting, if not this iconic one, from the Californian landscape series? This seemed to me to be a bit of a cheat.
There is a video on the RA website in which he discussed his huge painting, A Closer Grand Canyon, (which is in the RA show, and has the most amazing colours, especially strong reds) ) and which was done on a large number of smaller, roughly 2' x 3' canvasses, all hung together to make a single picture.. He explained that the Mulholland Drive painting was done in acrylic on a single canvas, and it is absolutely huge and therefore very difficult to move - and the LA gallery wouldn't agree to move it because of the risk of damage. So that explained the photographic reproduction - but it's a pity the gallery notes in the RA show didn't explain the reasons why.
However, they did have the original of Nichols Canyon, also 1980, which was terrific, and similar in style and colours to the Mulholland Drive original.
I did like very much the i-pad drawings, of which about 50 had been enlarged and printed on A2 sheets. Presented this way the wonderful use of line and colour really shows up well.
Image copied from The Guardian website here.
A whole room full of them hung three rows high, was also quite startling. There was quite a lot of repetition in the subject matter of these drawings, but somehow this was less troublesome (to me, the viewer) in the i-pad drawings than in the bigger tree paintings.
Then there was a room with 6 cabinets containing some of his sketchbooks, and cleverly-mounted screens above each one showing a looped sequence of images of each of the sketch-book pages. These were truly inspiring for me. His drawings are generally lovely - simple, clear, lots of pen and ink, and lots of watercolour. He uses books of varying sizes, and seemed frequently to fill a book in a single day. Some of the pages showed that even Hockney can make a mess of a drawing sometimes! Some of the pages had very little, a few smile lines, the idea of a drawing rather than a finished sketch. Others were very detailed, with heavily worked sketches covering a double page. I learned a lot from these, about his process and about simply getting on with doing the drawing, and not worrying too much about composition or subject matter. Some of the pages were very hum-drum domestic subjects, the breakfast things on the table, a plate or a book. Drawing every day is the thing.
This he now does increasingly on his i-pad rather than in a sketch book, and there were a fair number of small i-pad images too. And then some, drawn in Yosemite National Park in the US, which had been magnified and enlarged massively - to fill a whole wall in the fnal room. You would expect them to lose their impact when enlarged so very far - but somehow they were enhanced, and the quality of the print, and the coverage of the colour, was fantastic.
I think I liked these best of all, after the sketchbooks.
Finally there was a room showing some of his videos made with 18 adjacent but slightly mis-aligned cameras. The idea was, I think, to replicate the way the human eye looks at lots of separate images simultaneously and somehow magically joins them up to crate a single image. But our eyes are flitting boat all the time, and our perspective changes constantly as we move our heads. The video images attempt to copy this sense of movement and overlapping images. Some of the film sequences were just of hedges or trees, with leaves waving in the wind. The nicest, I thought, were the ones of dancers, which had clearly been great fun for those involved too.
Overall, I enjoyed the exhibition but I felt that Hockney's landscape work, while impressive in many ways, had been a bit over-hyped. And the RA was no doubt making a fortune from the crowds, the books, the merchandising, etc. I would have preferred to see more of a retrospective covering a wider range of Hockney's work, rather than concentrating so much space and energy on a very specific period and style of his work. But perhaps that will be coming at a future date.
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