The wonderful artist David Hockney as died today.
Hockney first made a real dent in my universe in the film ‘Tim’s Vermeer’ and in his book ‘Secret Knowledge’ where he discusses how he believes many of the great artists used technology to make their great works. He believes Da Vinci and many others like Vermeer used the Camera Obscura to create their great works.
Case in point: Vermeer’s uncanny 3D realism paintings which shone above his contemporaries in terms of looking like ‘photographs’, which, if Hockney is right : they are. The ‘Girl with the Pearl Earing’ is not only a beautiful work of art, but it could also be viewed as a photograph that is recorded faithfully in paint.
All of Vermeer’s paintings were painted in the same studio room, are off similar dimensions, and seem to show chromatic aberrations and other lens defects in the final work.
For me, Hockney, like most, if not all, the painters I love, were photographers at heart. The only difference was that they used oil and their memory and imagination to show others what they saw.
Many photographer's make the error of assuming that we all see the same things.
In a literal sense I don’t even know if that’s really true, and how can I know? For how does one know that the red of the balloon that they experience, is the same red that others experience?
We cannot know. And we will never know.
No, photography is not literal, and it never has been. In a way, it is a lie that was spun many years ago that the camera captures what is there.
Photographs are interpretations. They do not show truth, because truth is often a matter of perspective.
To me, photography is the modern way of paining. If Da Vinci was alive, I am sure he would embrace the camera. He would look at is for what it is: a tool for image capture, and one which will create almost anything depending on who’s hands it is in.
Indeed, Hockney himself played with electronic mediums to create and display his images.
All photographers are painters. All painters are photographers.
I do not know of one notable photographer that does not love painting. Indeed, if I remember correctly, Henri Cartier Bresson starter as a painter, and in later life returned to it.
I love the world of painting. Paintings are photographs in oil, or watercolour or acrylic. For painters are obsessed with light and shade, or colour or monochrome. Photographers, like painters, love a great composition.
Hockney’s paintings are studies in light, shade and form. They are highly individualistic. He was not afraid to show others how he saw the world, and in my view, that is what painters should do.
It’s also what photographer’s should do: show others their unique vision of the world.