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Background Information
Background Information
David Hockney, (born 9 July 1937) is a British painter. He is an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s and is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century.
Hockney has lived and worked in Britain residing in Bridlington and London. America has also been home to David Hockney, living and working in California Los Angeles residing in the Hollywood hills and Malibu.
From 1967 David Hockney is known to have become infatuated with Los Angeles and makes numerous paintings influenced by the Californian lifestyle. Despite contributing to Pop Art Hockney’s influences pre date inspired by the masters of modern art, Picasso, Cezanne, Matisse and Vincent Van Gogh
A Bigger Splash, 1967
Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1972
Garrowby Hill, 1998
My Parents, 1977
Social, Cultural and/or other Influences
Social, Cultural and/or other Influences
Technology, specifically Hockney’s use of a camera to produce an artwork. He was later influenced by the invention of computer technology such as mobile phones and iPad, allowing artists to work in an electronic medium.
Hockney embraced modernity. His portrait of his mother, a photographic joiner uses a multiple viewpoint, much like Cubism, to comment on the fragility of life.
As Hockney grew into his new style of photography, he moved to a more free approach. For this method, he would take many photographs over a period. This was quicker than the Polaroid’s but also meant that it was more complex and often required greater planning. For this, as with his earlier work, he often used friends and family – with whom he could spend lots of time and could develop close emotional bonds and understanding.
Hockney has taken inspiration from Picasso throughout his career. Cubism and cubist theory have formed a significant foundation for his art, in both painting and photography, since around 1980. The influence of Picasso emerges in Hockney’s artistic development so repeatedly and consistently that it almost provides a narrative to the younger artist’s career. Because the photographs were taken from different perspectives and at slightly different times, the result is work that has an affinity with Cubism, one of Hockney's major aims - discussing the way human vision works
Many of Hockney’s paintings demonstrate direct influences from his parents. In particular, he depicts the tenderness of relationships, between his parents and himself. He was particularly close to his mother, evident in the way he captures her in paintings.
Hockney argues that the old masters achieved their representational effects using lens-based technologies such as the camera obscura and camera lucida. Hockney famously used the technology of photography in his paintings. In this painting, it is likely Hockney painted it from photographs instead of real life.
It is relevant that Hockney’s father is reading “Art & Photography” by Aaron Scharf. He was an art historian who contributed in particular to the history of photography. His investigation uncovered links between painting and photography, and evidence for artists using photography for reference and other purposes. He thus pioneered a new field of art history when Pop Art and other movements in the 1960s were reincorporating the medium of photography and reference to popular photographic images, into mainstream artistic practice.
Hockney's explicit references to art history in this painting have a purpose: the grand emotional quality of the canvas recalls the classical portraits of revolutionary 19th Century Neoclassical French artist Jacques-Louis David. The colours used in the background are also reminiscent of David’s “Oath of the Horatii”, emerald green with blues and reds used in the shadows.
In this painting, Hockney was influenced by Chardin, an 18th Century great Master, with his use of a simple background with minimal props. A Chardin book features in the painting to remind viewers of this influence.
On the wall we see cropped sections of an earlier self-portrait with studio interior and a reproduction of Piero della Francesca’s “Baptism of Christ” (early Renaissance period). The fact that he replaced his own self-portrait with studio interior is strongly suggestive of his intention to portray not his own person, but himself as an artist and painter. Della Francesca was also a mathematician considered an authority on perspective and geometry in his time, techniques which feature strongly in Hockney’s paintings.
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