pwa wrote:Hockney's stuff always looks like commercial graphic art to me, as if designed for a poster or a greetings card. It's nice, but that's about it.
I saw a documentary about him a couple of years back and in it he was outdoors looking at a landscape, probably in East Yorkshire, prior to painting it, and pointing out that most people would see just shades of green but he was seeing purple and red and God knows what. And that's how he painted it. It looked nothing like any real landscape I've ever seen, so to me the only thing he "captured" was stuff in his head. Maybe we should say he was painting what he felt rather than saw in a literal sense, but it did nothing for me. It was a case of The Emperor's New Clothes, with people raving about how wonderful it is, and me muttering to myself "but it isn't actually very good".
Before I saw a van Gogh in the flesh(paint?)I thought 'that's nice',once I'd seen his work for real I stood there and thought WOW!!!