David Hockney at the Royal Academy

[Chris Newman]

I may have missed a thread on this topic. If so please feel free to conflate them.

I went today to Mr Hockney's vibrant evocation of Yorkshire and a few dabbles in other climes. I wondered if any others have been and what they thought. Rather than go too much into detail on my opinions I let others have their say....if I can wait. I booked my ticket in the week that the exhibition opened and today was the first time I could get admission without queuing for a couple of hours or more: I gather the night-time openings are popular and easier to get in.

I think it has probably turned out to be the biggest art event ever.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

we went last Monday on spec and queued for three and a half hours .... agony for the skeleton but happily the weather was fine and we had a sort of picnic and long and exceeding pleasant chats with our neighbouring queuers .... and we then kept exchanging notes as we all traversed the exhibition

we also had an exceptionally good day with the trains, the timetable working and changes worked like clockwork and all for a very reasonable fare including the tube .... two hours door to door

i say this so that you will understand the physical and social context that set our mood for the paintings .... did not matter a jot we were just blown away ... i have been to two exhibitions with this major impact ... a major retrospective of Rothko at the Tate and a similar scale retrospective of Georgia O'Keefe at the Met in NYC both back in the 80s both these and the Hockney left me walking a good six inches off the ground ...

three days later i can not recall the travel or the physical agonies but the paintings are vivid and the conversations still glow .... it seems most people find it a gas ...subsequently i have reread the reviews in the main broadsheet press and don't get their opinions .... seems to me Hockney is talking to us punters about looking and living in ways we find both inspiring and congenial .... not only that but his craftsmanship and scholarship are evident but not in the least intimidating ... i think this presents the art world critics with a difficulty ... so they seem rather picky and negative to my reading .... still i doubt they would know a transcendent joy if it slapped them in the face like a pound of wet cod .... and of course they went to a private preview i guess .... the whole social event is key to this as well, it feels like a community being energised by a vision of its places ...

[amateur51]

we went last Monday on spec and queued for three and a half hours .... agony for the skeleton but happily the weather was fine and we had a sort of picnic and long and exceeding pleasant chats with our neighbouring queuers .... and we then kept exchanging notes as we all traversed the exhibition

we also had an exceptionally good day with the trains, the timetable working and changes worked like clockwork and all for a very reasonable fare including the tube .... two hours door to door

i say this so that you will understand the physical and social context that set our mood for the paintings .... did not matter a jot we were just blown away ... i have been to two exhibitions with this major impact ... a major retrospective of Rothko at the Tate and a similar scale retrospective of Georgia O'Keefe at the Met in NYC both back in the 80s both these and the Hockney left me walking a good six inches off the ground ...

three days later i can not recall the travel or the physical agonies but the paintings are vivid and the conversations still glow .... it seems most people find it a gas ...subsequently i have reread the reviews in the main broadsheet press and don't get their opinions .... seems to me Hockney is talking to us punters about looking and living in ways we find both inspiring and congenial .... not only that but his craftsmanship and scholarship are evident but not in the least intimidating ... i think this presents the art world critics with a difficulty ... so they seem rather picky and negative to my reading .... still i doubt they would know a transcendent joy if it slapped them in the face like a pound of wet cod .... and of course they went to a private preview i guess .... the whole social event is key to this as well, it feels like a community being energised by a vision of its places ...

Calum a great post, exactly how I feel, and the Rothko did the same for me too.

I've been twice, the first time with an art historian who knows Hockney well and who was was very positive and couldn't understand why the critics had been so sniffy/snitty about it Everything you say was mirrored in my experience - people were excited, chatting with each other about what they were seeing, painting, not art per se, but about the problems of representation etc and how much of what Hockney was presenting resonated with their own experience. Truly a triumph!

I'm looking forward to getting the book and the DVD and they're on my Santa List already

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

On a few occasions when I've played in concerts in Bridlington Priory, the great man has been sitting in the audience. You can see Hockney's work at Salts Mill, Saltaire, near Bradford in a permanent exhibition. Highly recommended.

[Chris Newman]

I thought the scale of the exhibition was overwhelming. And the colour! What Colour!! Suddenly the English landscape is proud and bright. We have to thank the artist for the incredible vast acreage of work that he has done in an amazingly short time, mostly in oils (a fairly new medium to the artist) with some drawn on iPad.

"Technology always has contributed to art. The brush itself is a piece of technology"; so Hockney answers critics that quibble about the iPad and Paintshop. Yet it is true that all the work of drawing and laying down of colour he undertakes through a computer is almost identical to the work done with paint. The only thing missing is the smell. The fact that the art can be stored on CDs and easily reproduced is simply progress. Interestingly, some of the most recent giant paintings seem to have absorbed influence from Van Gogh with their whirly shapes. Whether that is deliberate imitative flattery or an offshoot of sometimes using a broad "brush" in Paintshop it adds to the variety in this huge assemblage of art.

The exhibition includes some early landscapes from his student days and paintings we saw around Bond Street in 1968 or thereabouts. There are few works from the USA, Grand Canyon, Yosemite and California but the most beautiful pictures are of Yorkshire. His "tunnel" pictures of a drive through trees in different seasons (rather like Monet's haystacks) are exquisite. The cut timber paintings with their amazing use of "wrong" colours have great majesty.

The photomontages (Grand Canyon) of ten or more years ago with the paintings resulting from them and his recent use of multiple movie cameras affixed to a slowly moving vehicle passing though forests and shown on huge screens are testament to the ever-interesting exploratory manner in which Hockney's work has developed and continues to develop.

The crowd at the RA is not quite as dense as when the Freud exhibition opened but, of course, that is a much smaller blockbuster. The little Leonardo drawings exhibition some years ago at the V & A must be the worst crush I have experienced.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I thought the scale of the exhibition was overwhelming. And the colour! What Colour!! Suddenly the English landscape is proud and bright. We have to thank the artist for the incredible vast acreage of work that he has done in an amazingly short time, mostly in oils (a fairly new medium to the artist) with some drawn on iPad.

"Technology always has contributed to art. The brush itself is a piece of technology"; so Hockney answers critics that quibble about the iPad and Paintshop. Yet it is true that all the work of drawing and laying down of colour he undertakes through a computer is almost identical to the work done with paint. The only thing missing is the smell. The fact that the art can be stored on CDs and easily reproduced is simply progress. Interestingly, some of the most recent giant paintings seem to have absorbed influence from Van Gogh with their whirly shapes. Whether that is deliberate imitative flattery or an offshoot of sometimes using a broad "brush" in Paintshop it adds to the variety in this huge assemblage of art.

The exhibition includes some early landscapes from his student days and paintings we saw around Bond Street in 1968 or thereabouts. There are few works from the USA, Grand Canyon, Yosemite and California but the most beautiful pictures are of Yorkshire. His "tunnel" pictures of a drive through trees in different seasons (rather like Monet's haystacks) are exquisite. The cut timber paintings with their amazing use of "wrong" colours .

The extra-ordinary light that occurs in the Yorkshire Wolds is something that only Hockney has truly captured. His "wrong" colours are in a sense more "right" than the actual colours. I pass some of the locations portrayed in the exhibition on a weekly basis.

[gurnemanz]

There are quite a few contributions on the iPad thread from about here on:

http://www.for3.org/forums/showthread.php?4910-Should-I-Buy-an-iPad&p=147103#post147103

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

The extra-ordinary light that occurs in the Yorkshire Wolds is something that only Hockney has truly captured. His "wrong" colours are in a sense more "right" than the actual colours.

I pass some of the locations portrayed in the exhibition on a weekly basis.

Oh Lucky Man!