Carol Kino’s David Hockney profile is nicely done but the multi-media pieces that accompany it are even more compelling. Hockney has taken to creating large landscape paintings–many will be on view in New York soon–and there’s a nice slideshow narrated by him. (Click on the image above to see/hear it.)
That shouldn’t distract from Kino’s explanations of Hockney’s infatuation with technology:
“But I quickly realized not only can I send notes, but I could send drawings. And I decided if you made drawings especially for a fax machine, you could make interesting things.” […]
It was immediately clear that — his new passion for plein-air painting aside — Mr. Hockney has a new love: digital technology. Around the room hung multiple photographs by Jonathan Wilkinson, his full-time technology assistant, of artworks that were also hanging on the walls. They were so exact that it was often hard to tell the originals from the photographs.
The confusion was intensified because some of the originals actually began life as photographs — like the two 27-foot-long friezes depicting a group of trees Mr. Hockney noticed at the edge of town, which he photographed individually, then collaged together and detailed in Photoshop. Others were made at home on a Macintosh, including portraits he painted earlier this year using Photoshop and a Wacom tablet. (A selection will be at Pace Prints.) Near a table covered with video cameras, someone had tacked up printouts of Mr. Hockney’s iPhone paintings.
Mr. Hockney also uses the computer to compose his paintings, either to help him step back and regard the whole of a multipanel work or to refine individual canvases. He often tries out colors and ideas on a photograph of an unfinished painting, or plays around with a JPEG of the image in Photoshop. Afterward he returns to the studio to put his ideas on canvas.
David Hockney’s Long Road Home (NYTimes)
