David Hockney's Art Techniques: Technology, Media & Photography

When asked in a 1980s interview what made him so popular, David Hockney replied: “I’m interested in ways of looking and trying to think of it in simple ways… Everyone can look. It’s just a question of how hard they’re willing to look, isn’t it.” He’s never stopped asking how we see – and crucially, how we might see differently. Whether with paintbrushes, Polaroids, fax machines or iPads, Hockney has spent decades exploring new ways of capturing time and space. And long before digital art became the buzzword it is today, he was already treating technology not as a threat to tradition, but as a new medium of translating the world as he sees it. Hockney has said that he works every single day, so it’s not surprising that he’s always looking for ways to innovate his practice. Since establishing his personal style, he has taken familiar technologies and pushed them to new and novel artistic ends. Around the early 1980s, Hockney invented what he called “joiners,” large-scale photographic collages made by assembling dozens (sometimes hundreds) of separate photos into a single image. These began as Polaroid snapshots and 35mm prints of a scene, which Hockney would manually arrange like a patchwork. Unlike a single photograph, which freezes one moment from one viewpoint, his joiners reveal a scene from multiple perspectives and moments in time - blurring the fine line between still photography and animated film. Hockney believed that this technique was “closer to how the eye actually sees” – not as a single fixed image, but as a succession of glances and changing focus. Read more: https://www.myartbroker.com/artist-da...