home  previous exhibitions Watercolours by David Hockney - Midsummer: East Yorkshire 2004

17 November 2005 - 5 March 2006
The Gilbert Collection is delighted to present an exhibition of water-colours by David Hockney.

Midsummer: East Yorkshire 2004 complemented Gainsborough to Turner: British Watercolours from the Spooner Collection which was displayed concurrently at the Hermitage Rooms, also in the South Building of Somerset House.

David Hockney, "Midsummer: East Yorkshire" 2004, 36-part watercolour on paper, 15 X 22.5" each, © David Hockney

Landscape has been a recurrent and increasingly urgent theme in David Hockney’s work since the mid-1950s. His original sense of purpose remains undimmed: that of observing the world around him and of giving it such vivid pictorial form that the spectator, in turn, feels immersed in the space and in its particularities of form, texture and light.

His first landscapes – or, more specifically, his first cityscapes – were those he made of his native Bradford as a student. Midsummer: East Yorkshire 2004, a series of 36 watercolours presented as a single work, finds him back in the countryside that he first got to know intimately in his childhood and in his teenage years, when he spent summers earning pocket money as an agricultural labourer in the Wolds. This unspoiled rural corner of England is the very area to which he began making regular visits in the late 1980s – when his mother settled in the seaside town of Bridlington in the company of his sister, Margaret – and on which he has lavished his attention and affection in the landscapes that have become a central subject of his recent work. Tinged for him with nostalgia and with memories of family and friends no longer living, these pictures acknowledge mortality while glorifying the persistence of life.

From March 2002 through to early 2005 Hockney concentrated almost exclusively on watercolour, a medium with which he had previously only briefly experimented. Well aware that watercolour painting had fallen into disrepute as the medium of choice for the amateur artist and Sunday painter, Hockney defiantly set out to reassert its serious possibilities, seeking inspiration from the great British landscape painters of the 18th and 19th centuries, whose artistic achievements are celebrated in the exhibition of works on view at the Hermitage Rooms.

In 2001 Hockney published Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the lost techniques of the Old Masters, an investigation into the use of optical aids by western painters from the early 15th to the 19th century. His research left him convinced that the photographic ways of seeing now commonly accepted as ‘real’ were to be resisted. As he remarked: ‘The Chinese say that painting draws on three things: the eye, the heart, and the hand. And I longed to return to the hand.’

Hung in six rows of six sheets each so that the whole series can be apprehended in a sweep of vision as a single work – offering the spectator multiple points of entry, rather than just one static viewpoint – Midsummer: East Yorkshire 2004 reveals an artist in full command of his powers. Painted around the time of his 67th birthday, these watercolours convey a love of life and of the magical properties of painting itself.

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