Catalogue
This exhibition is accompanied by a 74 page fully illustrated catalogue,
with
a foreword by Peter Goulds and a text by David Hockney.
74 pages
Hardback, $60
click here for the publications page
 Why
go on painting in Yorkshire?
Is it possible to do anything new in the
landscape genre? Most of the art world thinks it’s
not worth doing anymore.
In Europe, the idea grew that painting
was finished, not needed. This is because it had been replaced
by something - the photograph - the pencil of nature, the
truth itself. This assumes photography is modern; at least
it’s only 180 years old. If one rejects the “immaculate
conception” theory of photography - it came from nowhere,
about 1839 - one begins to see another history.
The optical projective of nature is a view
of the world from one point. It is not a human view. The
camera sees surfaces, we see space.
If one begins to see that both perspective
(one point) and chiaroscuro come, not from observing nature,
as art history suggests, but from observing the optical projection
of it on a flat surface, as I suggest, one gets a very different
view of the past and of today. (Is film stuck because it
just uses one camera to make pictures and is therefore Alberti’s
window, which now seems to be a prison?)
It is the position I now find myself in,
realising that two hundred years ago Constable would have
thought the optical projection of nature was something to
aim for. I now know it is not - so stand in the landscape
you love, try and depict your feelings of space, and forget
photographic vision, which is distancing us too much from
the physical world.
David Hockney, February 2007
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