(1).png){kind=small}
.png){kind=small}
.png){kind=small}
True to Life, 1
Last summer and fall I read a book about David Hockney, True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney, by Lawrence Weschler. It was a wonderful read (and yes, I’ve mentioned it before.) I thought it might be fun to do a series of brief posts with quotes from the book that resonated with me for whatever reason. The book is arranged in chronological fashion, so you can see how Hockney evolves. These quotations come from the 1983 chapter, when Hockney was working with photography (remember those polaroid collages?).
“All you can do with most ordinary photographs is stare at them–they stare back, blankly–and presently your concentration begins to fade. They stare you down. I mean, photoraphy is all right if you don’t mind looking at teh world from the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops–for a split second [emphasis in book]. But that’s not what it’s like to live in the world, or to convey the experience of the living world.
“During the last several months I’ve come to realize that it has something to do with the amount of time that’s been put into the image. I mean, Rembrandt spent days, weeks, painting a portrait. …” (p. 6-7)
This hit home for me, because look at how long it takes to make an art quilt. A painting, by contrast, can be done in days… even the briefest of textile sketches takes that long, let alone a major work (or even a medium one!).
And then, later on (p. 10), discussing the use of multiple photographs in one composition:
Indeed, that’s what this collage finally looked most like—the very experience of looking as it transpires across. time.
…”From that first day, ” Hockney recalls, “I was exhilarated. First of all, I immediately realized I’d conquered my problem with time in photography. It takes time to see these pictures—you can look at them for a long time, they invite that sort of looking. But more importantly, I realized that this sort of picture came closer to how we actually see, which is to say, not all at once but rather in discrete, separate glimpses, which we then build up into our continuous experience of the world.” [emphasis added by Sarah]
I’ll be back with more of these gems every now and then. In the meantime, On my reading list: Weschler’s book “Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin.” Until reading the book on Hockney I had never heard of Irwin, though he is apparently the contemporary of Hockney and of the same (ethereal, or at least exalted) stature in art circles. It was, according to the inside cover blurb on True to Life, Hockney’s reaction to that book that caused Hockney to telephone Weschler to “say that while he disagreed with virtually everything in it, he couldn’t get it out of his mind.” Well, given how much I’ve enjoyed Hockney (as revealed through True to Life) I thought it would be useful to read that with which he agreed. For now, I’ll pop in now and then with quotes from this book while I’m reading the other one (don’t hold your breath… it will take months–these are books to be read while alert and awake, not my usual evening condition when I have time to read). Stay tuned!
January 11th, 2012 at 6:53 am
Hans and I went to the National Gallery to see the Renaissance exhibition. It was wonderful. The colours were so bright and clear. Lots of beautiful portraits. Paintaings by Raphael, Botticelli, Bellini, Titian and others. Have a look here:
http://nga.gov.au/Exhibition/RENAISSANCE/. Afterwards we had lunch in the National Gallery restaurant. A very pleasant morning was had by all.
January 11th, 2012 at 11:34 am
I love the part about separate glimpses that we build up into our continuous experience of the world. That is so true and something I never thought about.