Figure Drawing week 4- Tate Britain David Hockney Exhibition

I hadn't seen much of Hockney's work before attending the exhibition and had a perhaps bias view that most of his paintings had a style that was quite simplistic and childish. When looking around the exhibit I felt that sometimes my expectations were correct, however I actually quite enjoyed looking at the work by the end. Overall I seemed to like his later works better, some of which included the photography collages, moving images (of the different seasons in the same place), figure and digital (iPad) drawings. I particularly liked the moving images where the viewer was drawing into and emersed by the environment depicted. It enabled the viewer to experience it how Hockney would have experienced it.
I also liked the way his digital paintings were displayed. They were shown in the form of a recorded time lapse, enabling the viewer to see his drawing process and how when he wants to change a part of his painting, he will just draw over it instead of rubbing it out and do the section again like most people would. A lot of the time during or sessions in the studio we were told that it was ok to make mistakes and we could just work over the original drawing to get the proportions of the figure right. Whilst I understood this at the time, I felt like it only made full sense to me when I saw this happening in Hockney's process. By using this digital medium I saw how Hockney was able to focus in on elements of his paintings, creating detail where necessary when the painting was complete and enlarged as he continually was able to add to the canvas and expand his work surface. This eliminates the possibility of not finishing the drawing within the work space which I often experience as I don't always plan my drawings out very well.

I particularly liked his photography work where he recreated images by collaging and overlaying small sections of the original.

Pearblossom Highway, 11th-18th April 1986

In this example you can see that Hockney hasn't aligned and positioned the smaller photographs in their exact place and orientation on the larger canvas. This distorts the image but miraculously the viewer's brain is able to work out where the different images are mean to be in relation to each other and imagine what the artist originally saw. What is increasingly interesting about this piece is how the lighting differs when comparing some of the smaller images, suggesting that he took separate photographs of the same landscape at different times of the day and then composed the piece combining all of these variations of lighting.

Overall the exhibition was a good experience as I was able to see how figure drawing and image making in general can be very experimental due to the many different mediums that Hockney used. It also gave me the opportunity to see his very much trial and error approach to image making, encouraging me not to be so afraid of making mistakes.