What is david hockney famous for

David Hockney is known to experiment across many mediums and, while primarily known for his paintings and prints, his photographic works are often overlooked. From , he used photographs as the foundation for plotting complex compositions for large-scale paintings. By the s, Hockney was using photography to serially document his life and experiences.

This was pivotal, as Hockney began addressing the limitations of perspective in conventional point and shoot photography. Sayag suggested Hockney adopt the Polaroid — a form of instant print — to achieve this effect and to help him compose larger works. Hockney embraced the idea, employing the Polaroid to incorporate multiple perspectives within a single artwork.

He posits that many master painters used tools like the camera obscura, camera lucida and mirrors to achieve a hyper-realistic painting style. Camera obscura is a natural phenomenon whereby a beam of light is shone through a tiny hole into a dark room, resulting in an inverse projection of what can be seen beyond the hole, onto the opposite inner wall.

Hockney argues that these images were essentially staged, using light and a deep understanding of composition, akin to his own manipulation of spatial perception. His ongoing effort to render convincing, spatially coherent perspectives is undoubtedly rooted in the old master tradition. Attributed to his aversion of wide lens photography due to its distortive effect, his s experiments derive from his attempts to conjure more comprehensive renderings of scenes, portraits, and landscapes.

David hockney early life

Beginning rather simply, Hockney positioned his Polaroids in regimented grid-like structures to render scenes. He used these to map compositions for paintings, initially for landscapes that extended beyond the frame of a typical one-point-focus. The success of these works led to further experiments with more complex manipulations of perspective.

The works that follow more keenly observe mood, architecture, composition, and movement. Canal and Road is clearly inspired by Cubism, adopting its fragmented and abstracted forms to produce legible pictorial space.