20th Century Art: David Hockney a Personal Look

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I am a fan of David Hockney since seeing his double portraits. Displaying the character of a single sitter is a difficult skill to acquire. Most art students and even artists fail miserably when it comes to eliciting a feeling for what the sitter is like, not just what the sitter looks like. The double portrait presents a difficulty exponentially greater than just a single sitter. David Hockney presents his double portraits as an exposition, delightful to the eye.

His double portraits are not the only pictures of interest. His numerous studies, sketches and drawings bring fascination to many of us. In fact, my delight in using watercolor pencils are founded in enjoying his drawings.

Andy

Over the years my interest in Hockney waned as I went on to other interests. Along with ancient Roman writers such a Suetonius and Tacitus, my mind engages in questions over the cosmos, economic histories of nations, art history and the very act itself of drawing and painting. One day, aimlessly wandering the shops, I discovered a new work by David Hockney, called Secret Knowledge, a book purporting to explain certain optical peculiarities and anomalies in works of Western Art by use of optical devices like the camera obscura. Besides the thesis of this work and the fascinating subject, I was re-acquainted with the thoughts of Hockney and began experimenting with watercolor, watercolor pencils and colored pencils like this pencil drawing by Hockney of Andy Warhol.

This ignited energy may seem much less than extraordinary, but I was one of those that thought little of drawing as an end product, only a means to develop and refine painting, hardly worth keeping, really. My biases did not lead me to outrageous conclusions. I didn’t disparage those that drew. They just didn’t focus my interest. Having completed a refined drawing, and after using it as a reference for a painting, I tossed the drawing somewhere with little concern for where or how it wound up. Then along came Hockney.

Portrait of the Artist's Mother — Portrait of the Artist’s Mother by HBosler

Can it really be said that the mind is fixed in youth and substantial change impossible by middle age? Maybe it is possible to a paltry few? David Hockney has taught me to see a different way, a way impossible to see before. What is art good for if not for this remarkable metamorphosis, to bend the strongest steel, to melt the highest mountain.

Several years have passed and I still find pleasure in what I had thought as just a preliminary exercise. This picture of my mother is, of course, watercolor pencil on paper and is one of my beginning “Hockney” experiments. I have many others now. I have even ventured into one of the mediums I not only found no interest in–except those of Sargent and Homer–but disliked; that is, watercolor, even producing a couple of, yes, you guessed, double portraits.