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True to Life, 4
Another subject that is dear to my heart is storytelling, both in words/literature and in pictures/art. Hockney touches on this in True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney, by Lawrence Weschler, p. 47 (also from Cameraworks chapter, 1983).
“recently I’ve been trying to figure out ways of telling stories in which the viewer can set his own pace, moving forward and back, in and out, at his own discretion.”
Later, on p. 50, Hockney continues:
“I mean, the urge to depict and the longing to see depictions is very strong and very deep within us. It’s a five-thousand-year-old longing —- you see it all the way back to the cave paintings, this need to render the real world. We don’t create the world. It’s God’s world, he made it. We depict it, we try to understand it. And a longing like that doesn’t just disappear in one generation. Art is about correspondences—-making connections with the world and to each other. It’s about love in that sense–that is the origin of the erotic quality of art. We love to study images of the world, and especially images of people, our fellow creatures. And the problem with abstraction, finally, is that it goes too far inwards and the links become tenuous, or dissolve, and it becomes too hard to make those connections. You end up getting these claims by some of the formalist critics that art just isn’t for everybody—-but that’s ridiculous.
“The revival of the figure with many of the young painters today testifies to the enduring longing for depiction, although the crude character of much of this s o-called neo-expressionist drawing testifies to the deterioration in basic training which we’ve seen during the last couple generations. I mean, training people to draw is basically training them to look.”
WOOOO HOOOOO HOOOO! YES! we can all be trained to LOOK by training ourselves to draw! I’ve been saying that for some years now–so nice to see it confirmed by someone like Hockney! Folks in the 19th century, before the advent of the camera and/or before photography became widespread, could draw passably. No, not everyone was brilliant, but this is a skill that CAN be learned! (and a plug for a great book…The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards... I’ve done that through self study and hopefully will get back to going through it for a second time…yes, you can even teach yourself!)
And I love how Hockney doesn’t pussyfoot around—I too just don’t get the appeal of non-representational art. It just leaves me wondering “OK, what’s next?” I know some folks love it, are inspired and create that way. But I just don’t get it. I like the story, the connection to someone. Think about it…what would National Geographic be like without the photos?