David Hockney – New Ways of Seeing

BBC Radio 3

Timed to anticipate the David Hockey exhibition ‘ A Bigger Picture’ at the Royal Academy in January, this programme is presented by Rachel Campbell-Johnston and has a duel focus.  Hockney will give an account of his current fascination with new technology – his delight in being able to draw on his iPhone and iPad and the ability digital technology gives him to scale up his work to an epic size. He will talk about how such techniques alter our ways of seeing and how, for him as an artist, traditional photography has been overtaken by moving images which (more that traditional single perspective film) offer the kind of multiplicity of view akin to our own experience of seeing. But Hockney is also creating a new body of work (some of his best, many agree), painting en plein air. The subject is the Yorkshire landscapes of his childhood, and these pictures brilliantly capture light and the transition of the seasons. In this sense he’s deeply connected to the long tradition of European art about which, as we hear,  he is very knowledgeable. So, with one eye to the exhibition, we will set Hockney in the new place he occupies – forging new ways of seeing with new techniques out of the great tradition of landscape painting.


 

Produced by Susan Marling

Broadcast: January 2012