Every Artist's Art Is- David Hockney outtake 73/80
This video is an outtake from David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, an award-winning documentary by filmmaker Bruno Wollheim.
Watch the full film here: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/116394
Me: Did you always think your art would be about your life?
DH: Well yes, every artist’s art is, isn’t it?
My question slightly rattled David. Later he collected his thoughts and went on to say that his art is auto-biographical, in as much as it is describes the world and his place in it. I could sense an evasion, especially when he raised the spectre of those three great pillars of 20th century Western Modernist painting: Picasso, Matisse and Duchamp – who are all so different in their expression of the personal.
How to characterize what Hockney expresses of himself in his art? David is not a confessional artist, like say Frida Kahlo or Egon Schiele. Even as the writer of (at least) two memoirs, he does not disclose his private world of feeling. Instead the books inhabit a world of personal narrative, of research and enquiry, a fascination with a visual universe full of puzzles, conundrums and paradoxes.
My reading is a little different from most critics: I see a contradiction in Hockney’s art, a fullness of feeling and non-feeling. In his work one senses a gap between the strength of feeling and its object that is impossible to bridge. Sometimes this is evident in the most unexpected places, in say a still life of a teapot with cup and saucer (Breakfast at Malibu, Sunday, 1989), as much as in the few overtly autobiographical paintings like Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) 1972. I think this is because David paints and draws to understand himself, the work acting as an unconscious channel of mood and emotion, whatever its ostensible subject.
David would talk to me often about wanting the viewer to be in the scene, “to be in it”, in the space, or sharing in his excitement. Connection and disconnection give his images their power, and places Hockney in a distinguished group of artists whose art encapsulates beauty but at the same time a modern 20th century psychic discomfort or anguish. There is a parallel in Pierre Bonnard’s interiors, or in the music of Van Morrison.
My father Richard Wollheim, a philosopher of art and the mind, died while I was making the film. He wrote a brilliant essay on Hockney that treats some of the same themes (‘Hockney’s Work in Perspective’, Modern Painters, Winter 1988, 1 (4); 26-31). I’m hoping to get it republished in a book of collected essays in the next couple of years.
Filmed over three years with unprecedented access, A Bigger Picture captures Britain’s most beloved painter at work. David Hockney’s return from California to paint the East Yorkshire landscape of his childhood – outside, in all weathers, through the seasons – culminates in the largest picture ever made outdoors. It’s an inspiring story of a painter in creative dialogue with nature and photography, and a revealing portrait of Britain’s most popular and celebrated artist.
“This wonderful film … will be of lasting importance for future generations who want to understand Hockney’s art.” Saturday Review, BBC Radio 4
“Bruno Wollheim’s portrait of this forthright magus is an unqualified, life-enhancing joy from start to finish.” – The Sunday Times
“This film may well be the best anyone will ever make about Hockney’s process.” – The Times, London.
“As gently hypnotic and fulfilling as one of Hockney’s own works.” – Time Out
Watch the full documentary here: https://vimeo.com/224807729
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