Good Bye, David Hockney

From David Hockney's website today

When was I first aware of David Hockney?  I don't remember when we first met.  Probably in a Los Angeles museum.  He was living in LA while I was there, but we lived in different worlds.  But who knows if our paths ever crossed?  I wouldn't have recognized him, nor he, me.  

But I fell in love with his paintings at first sight.  I'm sure.  They captured the light and air and chaparral of the Santa Monica mountains.  And the modern houses with swimming pools that clung along the hillsides.  My parents knew a few folks who lived in such houses and I got to visit them as a child.  

So, much, much later, when I took a computer art class at the University of Alaska Anchorage, I picked Hockney.  Let me back up a bit.  At the end of the class, we had to recreate a "masterpiece."  This was a class full of art majors and then there was me.  But the professor, Mariano Gonzales calmed me one day by saying: "Steve, all these people are adapting from other genres - oil, water color, etc. to the computer.  You aren't burdened with that.  You are starting with the computer."

                                                                              

Mondrian, Tableau (1921) from Art In Context

Nevertheless, my first thought was to copy a Mondrian. 

But I settled for something else with relatively straight lines, something that was also special to
me - David Hockney's "Portrait of an Artist (Pool with two figures)", 1972.  

The picture on the right is in our garage covering the fuse box.  It's from a calendar.  The original is horizontal, not vertical.  

Below is the whole picture as it was painted.

From Hockney's website

I thought it would be easy.  Ha!  I was looking at the lines of the pool and the deck, but not at how complicated the water in the pool was or the landscape in the background, or the two people.  Below is a picture I took at Will Rogers State Park in LA, that shows the kind of landscape that's in the background of the pool picture and in my life growing up in LA.  What you can't experience here is the fragrance of the chaparral.  

My art project came out well.  Mariano told me he used it in other classes to show that 'even a "business professor" could do a good job.  [I taught public administration, not business!]  

I'd show you my version, but it's locked up on old discs that don't fit into any computer I still have.  

You learn a lot about a picture when you try to copy it.  Try it sometime.  It doesn't have to be great.  Just a sketch forces one to pay much closer attention than one normally does.  

When I picked the Hockney to duplicate, I wasn't sure it counted as a masterpiece.  It was just something I liked. In 2018 it sold for $90 million, which doesn't make it a masterpiece, but definitely puts it in the running.  I did a blog post then too.  

Shortly after that post, I posted pictures of the house after the November 2018 7.1 earthquake in Anchorage.  That post also has a photo of the Hockney in the garage - no damage or even slippage, though other things in the garage near it came down. 

Another post with Hockneys is of the art on the walls at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in LA, where my mom was for a few days in 2014.  (The 3rd, 4th, and 5th images)

More recently we saw a large Hockney exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  I can't believe I didn't post any pictures from that exhibit, but my Hockney search of the blog didn't find one.  

Go explore Hockney's website.  https://www.hockney.com/home

From Vanity Fair:

"David Hockney’s canary yellow hair went white years ago, his hearing was failing for decades, and he suffered a stroke in 2012. But the man considered by many to be the world’s greatest living painter had, year after year, decade after decade, steadfastly remained his boyish, familiar self: gabby, opinionated, workaholic, mischievous, chain-smoking, ever the bespectacled dandy surrounded by a reliable retinue of friends. It was as if Hockney transcended time. He was, after all, one of the few artists—along with Picasso, Dalí, Warhol, and Kahlo—who could be said to be iconic in the real, literal sense: instantly recognizable, indelibly familiar, culturally omnipresent. Hockney, put plainly, was the most famous artist in the world. He had been in the public eye for so long, and held dear by so many, that the announcement of his death, at the age of 88, not only triggers something of a global shock but also marks a turning point in the history of art. His is the most impactful passing of an artist since Warhol’s in 1987. A cause of death was not immediately available."