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True to Life, 3
True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney, by Lawrence Weschler.
Here’s a quote of something David Hockney said from True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney, by Lawrence Weschler, that will resonate for quilters (p. 30):
“But these early collages were really more like studies: you did them, just as you do a drawing sometimes, to teach yourself something: it doesn’t matter what they look like when you’re finished, that’s not why they were made. In this case, in retrospect, I realize I was training my visual memory, and this took a lot of time.”
YES yes YES! Those class projects are just that…learning experiences. You learn the technique, then go home, practice and make it your own. And it also shows that even someone like Hockney, an acknowledged master, took the time to learn and develop his skills and “eye.”
And another tidbit… I’ve never really much cared for Cubism, that angular way of painting developed in the early 20th century by Picasso and some of his contemporaries. But this quote made me understand how those painters were exploring a new way of seeing (p. 33):
“Cubism, I realized during those few days,” Hockney continued, “is about our own bodily presence in the world. It’s about the world, yes, but ultimately about where we are in it, how we are in it.” [emphasis in book]
So how we do apply that to representational art quilts. One thought that immediately occurs to me is that sometimes when I see art quilts of kids in fields and whatever, the thing that grates for me is that while the child may be well rendered–well done enough that if you saw that child come trotting down the hall, you’d recognize them as the child in the quilt–somehow the not-as-well-done of this sort of quilt will have a scene and a child, but not a child IN the scene… The most successful of these textile artworks convey the essence of the child being fully present in the place and time depicted.
And now we’ll return, for a time, to regularly scheduled blogging!
January 28th, 2012 at 6:40 am
I thoroughly enjoyed the BBC documentary about David Hockney and The Bigger Picture. In saw it on a plane but the DVD is apparently available. There’s a good review on Making a Mark at http://makingamark.blogspot.com/2009/07/review-hockney-bigger-picture.html