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拍品专文
David Hockney’s Woldgate Woods, Winter, 2010 is a dazzling continuation of the artist’s career-consuming project to better see the world around him. Filmed as part of a yearlong immersion in the landscape of the Yorkshire Wolds, this exquisite, sunbathed snowscape takes the viewer on a cinematic pilgrimage of sight. Against a clear blue sky a thick blanket of snow carpets the ground and encrusts the canopied branches of the trees. In places sun floods the frame, hanging low and out of sight, and casting long, dramatic shadows across the woodland floor as tones of cool, pale blue give way to shimmering bright whites. Part of a seasonal quartet documenting the effects of light and time on place, the film combines archetypal themes of Hockney’s practice with his insatiable pursuit of new technologies.
Woldgate Woods, Winter, 2010 has been exhibited in numerous surveys of the artist’s work, including the major travelling retrospective David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, which opened at the Royal Academy, London in 2012; David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, in 2014; and Hockney’s Eye: The Art and Technology of Depiction at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, in 2022. Others from the edition of the present work are held in the permanent collections of the Toldedo Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. and The David Hockney Foundation.
If Hockney’s early career is defined by the sun-kissed pools and vast canyons of the American West, his later years are typified by bucolic views of Yorkshire’s shifting light and gently rolling fields. Born in Bradford, Hockney’s Odyssean return to Yorkshire in the late 1990s was precipitated by the illnesses and later deaths of his mother and his close friend Jonathan Silver. Staying near to his mother, then in Bridlington, Hockney moved back from Los Angeles for what would be the first extended period he had spent in Yorkshire in two decades. He drove frequently across the moors, valleys and hills of East Yorkshire to visit Silver in Wetherby, and identified an untapped and fertile subject in the landscape of his youth. He recalled summers as a boy spent working on farmlands near Bridlington, and thought about the ways in which agriculture had shaped and reshaped the contours of his native soil. ‘I was painting the land, land that I myself had worked’ explained Hockney. ‘I had dwelt in those fields, so that out there, seeing, for me, necessarily came steeped in memory’ (D. Hockney quoted in L. Weschler, ‘Sometime Take the Time’ in David Hockney: Hand Eye Heart, exh. cat. L.A. Louver Gallery, Venice, CA 2005, p. 51). Pulsating with a quiet grandeur, Woldgate Woods, Winter, 2010 evokes an anticipatory nostalgia for the present.
The sense of expansive sight contained in the present work was achieved using nine separate cameras, affixed to the front of a Jeep driven smoothly at an average pace of five miles per hour. The footage was further decelerated during the editing process, imbuing the finished work with an alluring, hypnotic quality. The cameras were imperfectly aligned, so that as the vehicle trundles slowly along the snowy path, branches come in and out of view, appearing yet more bountiful despite the sparseness of the season. At times a gentle rocking evokes the sensation of the drive, grounding the viewer to an imagined terrain. During the filming process a live projection was viewed by Hockney through a nine-screen monitor located in the rear of the vehicle, which allowed him to ‘draw’ with the camera’s roaming eye.
The idea of the camera as a drawing tool is not novel within Hockney’s practice, recalling an important precursor to the present work. In the 1980s Hockney had produced a series of composite photographs and photo-collages which he referred to as ‘joiners’, exhibiting the series under the title Drawing with a Camera (Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, 1982). Initially made with Polaroid photographs, and later 35mm prints from a Pentax 110, these post-Cubist collages were an attempt to replicate true sight. This early adoption of the photographic medium would exert enormous influence on Hockney’s wider oeuvre, demonstrably in the vast, 60-canvas composite painting A Bigger Grand Canyon (1998, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra). ‘The joiners were much closer to the way we actually look at things,’ Hockney explains, ‘closer to the truth of the experience’ (D. Hockney, artist’s website).
Despite the spirit of experimentation which permeates Hockney’s oeuvre, it is one deeply rooted in art-historical tradition. Shortly after his return to Yorkshire he engaged in a remarkable excavation of the art of the past, in which he sought to establish that optics—the use of lenses and mirrors—had been a commonplace tool of artists dating back to the early fifteenth century. This, he suggested, had allowed the Old Masters to create ‘living projections’ of their subjects long before Vermeer’s well-documented use of the camera obscura in the seventeenth century (D. Hockney, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, London 2001, p. 12). In his text on the subject Hockney reveals how, as a practitioner of art, he is deeply curious about the tools which have propelled it forward through time. Unquestionably indebted to the British landscape tradition initiated by J. M. W. Turner and John Constable—he was particularly inspired by the latter’s ‘six footers,’ exhibited at Tate Britain in 2006—Hockney has also spoken of the effect of Monet’s Nymphéas at the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, whose vast surfaces, installed across curved walls, similarly envelop the viewer. Monet ‘looked hard at the world,’ suggests Hockney, and in the resplendent seasonal specificity of Woldgate Woods, Winter, 2010 is a tribute to Monet’s astonishing visual archive of shifting light and colour (D. Hockney, quoted in T. Barringer, ‘Seeing with Memory: Hockney and the Masters’ in David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, exh. cat. Royal Academy of Arts, London 2012, p. 50).
In his career as a landscape artist, Hockney has turned his finely-tuned gaze—which from the 1960s has so remarkably captured the essence of his portrait sitters—to the world around him, invariably perceptive to traces of agriculture and progress, as well as the slightest modulations in hue, light and shadow, on the ever-shifting contours of the land. Begun in earnest in 2004, his drawings, paintings, photographs, and iPad pictures of East Yorkshire comprise a poignant, radiant tribute to the landscape which produced one of the past century’s most significant and beloved artists. Woldgate Woods, Winter, 2010, in its mastery of modern media, is one of Hockney’s remarkable contributions to the history of visual and artistic innovation.
Woldgate Woods, Winter, 2010 has been exhibited in numerous surveys of the artist’s work, including the major travelling retrospective David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, which opened at the Royal Academy, London in 2012; David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, in 2014; and Hockney’s Eye: The Art and Technology of Depiction at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, in 2022. Others from the edition of the present work are held in the permanent collections of the Toldedo Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. and The David Hockney Foundation.
If Hockney’s early career is defined by the sun-kissed pools and vast canyons of the American West, his later years are typified by bucolic views of Yorkshire’s shifting light and gently rolling fields. Born in Bradford, Hockney’s Odyssean return to Yorkshire in the late 1990s was precipitated by the illnesses and later deaths of his mother and his close friend Jonathan Silver. Staying near to his mother, then in Bridlington, Hockney moved back from Los Angeles for what would be the first extended period he had spent in Yorkshire in two decades. He drove frequently across the moors, valleys and hills of East Yorkshire to visit Silver in Wetherby, and identified an untapped and fertile subject in the landscape of his youth. He recalled summers as a boy spent working on farmlands near Bridlington, and thought about the ways in which agriculture had shaped and reshaped the contours of his native soil. ‘I was painting the land, land that I myself had worked’ explained Hockney. ‘I had dwelt in those fields, so that out there, seeing, for me, necessarily came steeped in memory’ (D. Hockney quoted in L. Weschler, ‘Sometime Take the Time’ in David Hockney: Hand Eye Heart, exh. cat. L.A. Louver Gallery, Venice, CA 2005, p. 51). Pulsating with a quiet grandeur, Woldgate Woods, Winter, 2010 evokes an anticipatory nostalgia for the present.
The sense of expansive sight contained in the present work was achieved using nine separate cameras, affixed to the front of a Jeep driven smoothly at an average pace of five miles per hour. The footage was further decelerated during the editing process, imbuing the finished work with an alluring, hypnotic quality. The cameras were imperfectly aligned, so that as the vehicle trundles slowly along the snowy path, branches come in and out of view, appearing yet more bountiful despite the sparseness of the season. At times a gentle rocking evokes the sensation of the drive, grounding the viewer to an imagined terrain. During the filming process a live projection was viewed by Hockney through a nine-screen monitor located in the rear of the vehicle, which allowed him to ‘draw’ with the camera’s roaming eye.
The idea of the camera as a drawing tool is not novel within Hockney’s practice, recalling an important precursor to the present work. In the 1980s Hockney had produced a series of composite photographs and photo-collages which he referred to as ‘joiners’, exhibiting the series under the title Drawing with a Camera (Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, 1982). Initially made with Polaroid photographs, and later 35mm prints from a Pentax 110, these post-Cubist collages were an attempt to replicate true sight. This early adoption of the photographic medium would exert enormous influence on Hockney’s wider oeuvre, demonstrably in the vast, 60-canvas composite painting A Bigger Grand Canyon (1998, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra). ‘The joiners were much closer to the way we actually look at things,’ Hockney explains, ‘closer to the truth of the experience’ (D. Hockney, artist’s website).
Despite the spirit of experimentation which permeates Hockney’s oeuvre, it is one deeply rooted in art-historical tradition. Shortly after his return to Yorkshire he engaged in a remarkable excavation of the art of the past, in which he sought to establish that optics—the use of lenses and mirrors—had been a commonplace tool of artists dating back to the early fifteenth century. This, he suggested, had allowed the Old Masters to create ‘living projections’ of their subjects long before Vermeer’s well-documented use of the camera obscura in the seventeenth century (D. Hockney, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, London 2001, p. 12). In his text on the subject Hockney reveals how, as a practitioner of art, he is deeply curious about the tools which have propelled it forward through time. Unquestionably indebted to the British landscape tradition initiated by J. M. W. Turner and John Constable—he was particularly inspired by the latter’s ‘six footers,’ exhibited at Tate Britain in 2006—Hockney has also spoken of the effect of Monet’s Nymphéas at the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, whose vast surfaces, installed across curved walls, similarly envelop the viewer. Monet ‘looked hard at the world,’ suggests Hockney, and in the resplendent seasonal specificity of Woldgate Woods, Winter, 2010 is a tribute to Monet’s astonishing visual archive of shifting light and colour (D. Hockney, quoted in T. Barringer, ‘Seeing with Memory: Hockney and the Masters’ in David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, exh. cat. Royal Academy of Arts, London 2012, p. 50).
In his career as a landscape artist, Hockney has turned his finely-tuned gaze—which from the 1960s has so remarkably captured the essence of his portrait sitters—to the world around him, invariably perceptive to traces of agriculture and progress, as well as the slightest modulations in hue, light and shadow, on the ever-shifting contours of the land. Begun in earnest in 2004, his drawings, paintings, photographs, and iPad pictures of East Yorkshire comprise a poignant, radiant tribute to the landscape which produced one of the past century’s most significant and beloved artists. Woldgate Woods, Winter, 2010, in its mastery of modern media, is one of Hockney’s remarkable contributions to the history of visual and artistic innovation.