Up Close and Impersonal
“David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020”

 at the Art Institute of Chicago

 

by Evan Carter

 

Visitors to “David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020” are greeted by a television monitor affixed to a wall across from glass doors that open to a gallery featuring an exhibition of David Hockney’s recent digital renditions of bucolic Normandy France. Displayed on a loop, the monitor shows a timelapse video with the centralized image of a tree. It begins as a series of lines making up its trunk and branches that gradually bloom dots of green leaves before the loop starts again. It is a forecast of the daffy celebration of Impressionism through the medium of new technology that is this exhibition. These digital renderings of trees, flowers, grassy hills, rain, sunrises, and sunsets evoke the subjects of Hockney’s impressionist forebearers but lack just about all of the subtleties that can be afforded by the human hand and eye as well as the medium of paint itself.

According to the Art Institute website “He had first explored the technology in 2011, but this time developed an app which was adapted and developed to his specific requirements with new brushes and shapes.” It may come as a surprise to some that Hockney “developed, adapted, and developed” this app because the work seems so utterly conventional in its use of digital tools and, at times, cartoonish in its execution. On this particular visit, walking through this rectangular loop of a gallery one could hear snickering laughter and see perplexed smiles on the faces of viewers. Certain images of raindrops hitting water are particularly silly in Hockney’s use of a curly-cued “v” shape representing each individual splash. These drawn forms are akin to what one might find in a child’s drawing where the sun is a yellow circle with lines pointing away from it or the sky is one blue stripe across the top of a page. Better brushwork can be seen in art made by artificial intelligence, which granted is still yet to work en plein air.

This is not to dismiss the value of childlike whimsy and wonder in modern art. It is just that in this case it does not seem intentional or affecting. Instead, it is a disappointing reminder of the limitations that have been placed on such a skilled, visionary artist as David Hockney by the chosen medium. It must be mentioned that all this artist’s gifts were not lost in this approach. One of the stronger pieces titled No. 340, 21st May 2020 is a firm reminder of Hockney’s skill as a colorist. The image depicts a cluster of lily pads floating on the surface of still water that reflects a pale blue sky, green leaves, both punctuating a murky brown that is familiar to anyone who has ever visited a pond. Unlike many of the sprawling vistas featured in “The Arrival of Spring,” No 340 feels like a discernible space. At a glance it has an almost photographic quality that, after one step closer, crumbles under the presence of the clunky lines and repeated brush patterns of the custom iPad app.

Consistently, this work teases the idea that we are looking at painting. Also from the Art Institute website; “…his iPad works possess all the qualities of his paintings on canvas….” In spite of the fact that Hockney himself clearly enjoys this digital medium, this statement is a reductive take on his career as a painter and artist as well as an insult to the intelligence of those who follow his work and view this exhibition. A more apt description would be that this series is another addition to the diverse body of work by an artist who has explored figurative and abstract forms across a range of media. To say that any artist’s work possesses all the same qualities of what they produce in a completely different medium is just lazy.

Hockney is known for his bold use of color which can be subdued and predictable like in 1967’s A Bigger Splash to the hyperbolically saturated landscapes such as Nichols Canyon painted in 1980. The colors in “The Arrival of Spring” are not only highly saturated, they are also highly predictable. Leaves are green. Tree branches are brown. The sky is blue. The grass is also green. Oh boy is it green. So much so that, well, let’s just take a moment for the color green. And what better way than with an anecdote.

In FX’s televised series Fargo, a criminal mastermind played by Billy Bob Thornton prompts Colin Hank’s naive police officer to answer a question: “why can humans see more shades of green than any other color?” Viewers are later treated to an answer stating that it is due to human evolution selecting our eyes to discern predators in the wild, thus lending us the ability to perceive more shades of green. Assuming this to be true, it is perhaps also what makes the excessive use of the “G” in RBG so oppressive to the eye in these…paintings? drawings? If we have evolved to be more sensitive to green, is it any wonder we see so little of it used on our illuminated computers, televisions, and phones?

Digital imaging relies on RBG color meaning red, blue, and green are the primary colors used to make all other colors we can see on a screen. However, these three primaries are not equally weighted. Green has a much higher mcd (millicandela) rating than its red and blue counterparts. This is presumably by design so that technology has an optimized starting point for color mixing, making that familiar neon green a gateway to so many other colors. But as many a graphic designer or digital artist can likely attest; it can be tedious to generate a shade of green that is bright and natural looking without making you feel like you are staring at a piece of kryptonite.

It seems that the RBG color system may have posed a certain challenge with this body of work, not only to Hockney, but to the designers of this exhibition. The gallery walls are painted a cool dark gray offering a shadowy backdrop to these practically neon images that, like so many others, are viewed on a screen often with a black border, as opposed to the white wall of the contemporary art gallery. Though these images still radiate like uranium on the walls, it seemed like a wise decision. So much neon green on white walls may have called for photosensitivity warnings outside the gallery. In the least, it may have resulted in so many of these landscapes just sort of bleeding into one another and making one big schlocky mess.

There is something to be said for painters exploring the uses of new technology in the creation of art. It is just disappointing to see the technology place such dull constraints upon a painter whose storied career has produced work that has so wondrously straddled the line between the conventional and arrestingly unique. The video display outside the gallery promised something new, a vision previously unseen and now unleashed—an artist’s view of the natural world once stifled by the analog but now liberated by innovation. After leaving the gallery, that same video just felt like an apology.

 

 

Evan Carter is a visual artist and assistant editor of the New Art Examiner. He joined the team in 2017 while earning an MFA from the University of Chicago and has been covering arts and culture in the city and beyond ever since. He is invested in the creative community and its capacity to make meaning and reveal truth in everyday life.