David Hockney at the RA surprised me. I was fortunate to go with the Leighton Project students who I work with through Action Space. We had such a great day thanks to the RA running access workshops. The exhibition was packed making it hard to negotiate space to work with students with but on the whole everyone was very accommodating for the short time we spent in the gallery.
The amount of paintings on show is overwhelming and I was pleased that the workshop organisers focused on just four works to make the day manageable.
The overload of colour that Hockney works with is joyous and for a grey January day truly uplifting. I enjoyed seeing the Californian landscapes in comparison to those in Yorkshire.
Hockney’s delight in the landscape comes across. His time spent working in and looking at his surrounding landscapes is detailed in the changes in season and perspectives captured on the canvas, prints and video work. I think his work encourages us to look at and appreciate our landscapes in more detail and in a different way. We all see places and colours so differently and Hockney is celebrating this and challenging our preconceptions in his work.
Hockney acknowledges how much our memory and experiences influences our vision and therefore we see and interpret the world in our unique way.
“We see with memory. My memory is different from yours, so if we are both standing in the same place we’re not quite seeing the same thing. Different individuals have different memories; therefore other elements are playing a part. Whether you have been in a place before will affect you, and how well you know it. There is no objective vision ever – ever.’ (Hockney 2009 in interview with Martin Gayford, RA)
