A Bigger Picture - David Hockney at the Royal Academy

Oh, dear.

Oh, dear. I had tried to got to this exhibition without feeling negative towards it, but is now 8 hours since wandering around and I am still very unimpressed with the results by David Hockney.  There are some good bits, but mainly most of them would not be here without a 'name' to go with them.

The idea of Thixendale wood pictures at the start of the exhibition, having the same viewpoint taken from each season. Good idea, but the execution looked to naive. The early landscape before going to California was interesting. The Flight to Italy was a geographic map with a car travelling over them, with driver and passenger. I like this. Some of the Grand Canyon images and photographs were not bad and Mulholland Drive was engaging. Then I discovered it was a photographic replica and the original was still in California.

The next room of the beginning of these landscape were OK, from 1997, great shapes, bold colour, but lacking something. Perhaps it was the use of colour from his California pictures that gave them, a more expressive feel that the later pieces. I didn't like the water colours as they just felt very amateurish and the tunnel motif is some thing I had done earlier. So it was not revelatory as the exhibition notes suggested.

What did impressive me, where the charcoal drawings that were large clumps of trees in one almost solid block, but the trees were carved out. These seem to retain not only a great shape, but expressionless of the landscape. Adding colour seem to distort the viewer perception of the place, was it a landscape or just shapes of colour?

The Hawthorn series was fascinating as this was a theme that Stanley Spencer had tackled and much better than Hockney. Some of the pictures looked like things out of H P Lovecraft, perhaps I liked them for that only.

Again found that he had used the day by day motif that I am using in drawing diary of a painting a day. So you will not feel short changed by the lack of images as the galleries were packed wall to wall.

In a separate room was some film world a series of split screen that did not necessary match up to the the surrounding part of the grid. Intriguing? Yes, but great art, no. Similarly, Hockney had re-worked various images of Claude Lorraine's painting of the Sermon on the Mount, almost juvenile.

I liked the large ipad sketches, but I had my suspicions that because of their size, they dominated you as a viewer and you would think they were good. On the other hand, they were more subtle than the painting, possibly because they were more direct and immediate rather than worked upon and re-worked.  

And to think I was worried that Hockney was going to appear in a similar light to Graham Sutherland (after the barrage of criticism from the recent exhibition at the Tate Britain). Even his companion Royal Academician, Barbara Rae is way ahead of him. She engages you with the landscape and her work. I am still not impressed with these Hockney landscapes, on the other hand it was packed out with viewers, so what do I know?