Admiring David Hockney in Palm Springs

On a glorious 80° Saturday, I returned to my desert Happy Place for a reconnection with my friend, Kae.

After a required meetup at Koffi, our morning destination was the Palm Springs Art Museum for its newest exhibition. David Hockney: Perspective Should Be Reversed presents a wide body of works produced during a six-decade-long career. It features nearly 200 of the artist’s works in a variety of media. What a surprise!
David Hockney (July 9, 1937- ) is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. What an introduction to his talents.
Before attending this perspective, I only knew Mr. Hockney because of his swimming pools. Wow. There is so, so much more. 
I knew so little and learned so much. One interesting fact was that he has embraced technological tools from whatever era he was working in: fax machines, Xerox copiers, Polaroid cameras and, most recently, the iPad (drawings that have dominated his output for the past decade). Even his innovative embrace of lithography, an invention that dates back to 1796, feels like a technologically boundary-pushing art form. Without these machines, Hockney wouldn’t have had the capacity to churn out thousands of artworks over his career, helping him become a fixture in just about every institution’s modern art collection.
Walking into this gallery, I was in awe. Autour de la Maison (2019) might be the longest work of art I have ever seen. It is a 40 foot-long panorama created on an iPad which depicts, in detail, the changing seasons on Hockney's farm in Normandy. The representation of the landscape is organized in sequence and unfolds as if you were strolling the property. Very cool.




We also had to the opportunity to meet Celia Birtwell. Known as Hockney's muse and someone whose image has been captured by him often, Celia is a British textile designer and fashion designer, known for her distinctive bold, romantic and feminine designs, which are influenced by Picasso and Matisse, and the classical world. She was well known for her prints which epitomized the 1960s/70s.


I was surprised, too, to find so many connections to Pablo Picasso. Hockney produced this etching for a commemorative publication celebrating the master, when he died in 1973. In this image, a small-scale David Hockney gazes at an oversized bust of Picasso on a pedestal dramatizing the great artist's influence.
Here's Celia again, this time with a very Picasso vibe.
Hockney said of his idol, "The moment you realize what Picasso is doing, how he is using time as well - and that is why you could see round the back and the body as well as the front - once you begin to realize this, it becomes a very profound experience, because you begin to see what he is doing is not a distortion and slowly it then begins to look more and more real. In fact, it is naturalism that begins to look less and less real."

"Hockney’s experiments with photography and collage continue to the present day. He calls these “photographic drawings” and incorporates himself and his friends into Lynchian skewed rooms with impossible dimensions. He uses Photoshop to achieve uncanny compositions in which people, paintings and furniture are digitally composed into one space. Because Hockney minimizes each object’s light and shadows, the photos lose their depth and throw off our innate understanding of how figure-ground relationships work. We lose our sense of the horizon with no understanding of how we’d stand upright in these fictional places."

Blending the disciplines of painting, drawing, printmaking and photography, Hockney, now 87, has maintained an innovative approach to making new work. "Some artists do the same thing all the time", the artist stated in 2015. "It’s okay for some, but not for me. I feel I need variety, and I get it." From his cool and colorful splash paintings of Californian swimming pools to his numerous portraits and self-portraits, and from his Yorkshire landscapes to his photo collages, Hockney has continually revamped his style. I was especially taken with his sunflowers. He also stated, "I draw flowers every day and send them to my friends so they get fresh blooms every morning." What a sweet idea.
I was excited to have an opportunity to play with an iPad to get a little closer to the artist's creativity. What a truly amazing museum outing.
"What an artist is trying to do for people
is bring them closer to something,
because of course art is about sharing.
You wouldn't be an artist unless
you wanted to share an experience, a thought."
- David Hockney

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