(1).png){kind=small}
.png){kind=small}
.png){kind=small}
True to Life, 2
This set of quotes from True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney, by Lawrence Weschler, is also from the Cameraworks chapter (1983). These relate to LOOKING–or as I would put it, SEEING what is really there. After taking a number of quilting classes, when I started quilting in earnest, I realized that what I needed was not more quilting classes. I needed to learn to SEE. Not merely looking at something and moving along, but really SEEING what is there, how the lines relate and form shapes, create form and substance. On p. 14, Weschler quoted Hockney:
“The camera is a medium is what I suddenly realized,” Hockney explained. “It’s neither an art, a technique, a craft, nor a hobby—-it’s a tool. It’s an extraordinary drawing tool. … these collages are principally about line. An internal sleeve crease, for example, aligns in the next frame with the outer sleeve contour, and contours generall jag from one frame to the next, a series of locally abrupt disjunctions merging into a wider coherence.” [emphasis in book]
Way cool…. it’s that thing about how we see that I quoted in the first of these posts—how we see things as a series of snapshots that then merge to create a whole. This continues on p. 1:
“Yes,” he [Hockney] said, “I think some of the most effective collages in both the Polaroids and my more recent series involve the theme of looking—-of looking at people looking.”
and on p. 21:
Looking, for Hockney, is interest-ing: it is the continual projection of interest. “These collages only work,” Hockney explains, “bcause there is something interesting in every single square, something to catch your eye. Helmut Newton, the photograher, was by here the other day, and I said, ‘Everywhere I look is interesting.” ‘Not me,’ he replied, ‘I bore easily.’ Imagine! I’ve always loved that phrase of [18-19th c. English painter] Constable’s where he says, ‘I never saw and ugly thing,’ and doing these collages I think I’ve come to better understand what he means: It’s the very process of looking at something that makes it beautiful.”
I don’t suppose he was talking about our pug, <grin>, but there is truth there…the more you really look at something, the more interesting it becomes. I’ll be back anon with more from this wonderful book.
January 23rd, 2012 at 8:48 pm
I was surprised at your blog. I recently watched a video of Hockney talking about creating on his iPad. They showed him at a show of these huge landscapes. I was so entranced with his techniques and he conversation about defending painting on a computer .
I have to order this book on my kindle . He does make you look at what is around you so differently.
I agree with you about not taking too many quilting classes and
instead look for other inspirations.