Although I can’t draw without the aid of a ruler and the limits of my painting skills are decorating, I have always found the paintings produced by an artist fascinating. It was this fascination that took me down to David Hockney’s The Bigger Picture exhibition in the Royal Academy a few years ago.
Jostling for position around the paintings, the words of the American author Jerzy Kosinski were rolling around in my mind “The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.” Eventually I found enough space to take in a large picture of a woodland scene. Questions started to build up: was there a wind pushing the leaves to point along the path? why the choice of colours which felt like a Walt Disney production? What was the artist trying to evoke?
Out of the corner of my eye a tall figure with bushy grey hair, and long sideburns, caught my attention as he leaned closer to the painting. His thick fingers lifted up his glasses and propped them onto his forehead, and slowly took in the picture. Then spoke in a low voice, ‘Why .. why .. why?’ Pulling himself straight he slowly pulled his glasses down and looked up and with one final ‘why?’ I froze. Up to that point in time I had been absorbed in the painting trying to work out my own interpretation. Now my thoughts were being being interrupted by a stranger. I turned to see a man in a crisp light blue jacket and an open necked which gave him an air of authority. He turned his rugged face to me and his blue eyes seemed to widen as if to reinforce the question. But before I could try and find a reply he went on, ‘Why is there so much of it? It is far to big and overblown?’ he paused, then nodding his head, continued, ‘It is it so crude’. He then turned back to me. I scrambled for a few thoughts, after all this is David Hockney one of the greatest living artists, he must have been trying to say something. I started to reply, ‘I don’t know but there is something I like about it.’ He turned back to the picture and waving his right hand as though he was painting each line rattled off: ‘Picaso, Brueghel, or a Van Gogh, Picasso, Fauve or even a Frederick Gove may have influenced him, but he has failed!’ Some of the artists I had heard of, some I hadn’t. Then shaking his head again, ‘He was such a talented draughtsman …each touch of the brush capturing something about his subjects. Shrugging his shoulders, ‘Where has it gone, its as if the technology that he dabbles with has robbed him of his skills.’ At last I found a few words, ‘But isn’t he trying to tell us something about the countryside?’ I felt that this was a weak reply, and quickly followed on ‘Isn’t he trying to look at it differently?’ There I thought, I had replied, and hoping that the discussion was closed. But he came back, ‘In what way?’ After large parts of my life living in the countryside, I felt that I could reply with some confidence, ‘Look it is not a picture of the countryside, but for me’, stressing the me, ‘the exaggeration of colour and textures is making me think about looking more closely at woods, what am I really seeing?’ He turned and looked at me square on then turned his head to look at the picture then turned back to face me. By then people were starting to gather around us straining to find what was going on. ‘Money’ the man grunted - he stood back and looked around and in a tone that felt he had drawn a conclusion ‘money!’’, what we have paid to see this is propping up RA so that it can keep rolling out this sort of rubbish! He them turned and pointed to somewhere outside of the building, ‘It would be better up for sale on those railings across the way.’
Coming through from the next gallery I saw a security guard moving towards us. I turned back to the stranger and he gone! I never saw him again.
Later that day, on the train back to Crewe, I couldn’t get the stranger out of my mind. Who was he? Why did David Hockney’s work evoke such a reaction in him. I still liked the picture, but I couldn’t put my finger on why, and maybe that is what art does - no easy answers. I’ll never get a chance to ask David Hockney what he was trying to express or what feelings he was tying to evoke. But I continue to look more intensely at the composition of trees and plants when I walk through the local woods and maybe that is what is meant by the bigger picture.