David Hockney i Pad flowers

by Rosanna Albertini

at LA LOUVER, Los Angeles, February 2023

DAVID HOCKNEY, 28th February 2021, Roses in a Blue Vase, 2021 iPad painting printed on paper, 30 x 21 in @David Hockney, Courtesy of the artist and LA Louver

“New looking fresh pictures of a very beautiful world.” It is what Hockney thinks we need today. 

“Art as the desire of thinking fresh.”  My motto for this blog, since the beginning. 

Fresh explodes in both sentences like a stranger knocking the door within the line, vibrates between teeth, not really an idea, it’s a wish, like champaign spurting from the bottle. It is the sound of our emotional thinking dispersed in the air, no one can grasp it.

Each painting absorbs my attention filling the moment with a pleasure I can’t explain. The only sure thing is each vase of flowers is a great art work. 

No brushes, no sticky paint, no smells. Does it matter? It’s the art of painting. 

DAVID HOCKNEY, 16th February 2021, More Flowers in a Glass Vase, 2021 iPad painting printed on paper 30 x 21 in @David Hockney, Courtesy of the artist and LA Louver

DAVID HOCKNEY, 7th March 2021, More Flowers on a Table, 2021 iPad painting printed on paper, 30 x 21 in @David Hockney Courtesy of the artist and LA Louver

The visual conversation started with the artist observing the February light, low on the table, making a strong shadow on the tablecloth. Only the beginning of an agreement between David and the flowers, as if his body could feel the language of their image, with the light’s complicity, and his hands could weave among pixels his extremely personal, joyful conversation. 

Imagine the thinking shutting down but not completely, and the emotional reaction of the eyes receiving impulses of colors and shades and forms that flow into the artist until his mind participates, and becomes desire, desire of fresh pictures, desire of thinking fresh.

That’s what I touch as a viewer.

I also found A Letter From 

by Wallace Stevens confirming how important is the spontaneous ease in front of good art, although we hesitate to call it Joy. 

“One would have wanted more—more—more—

Some true interior to which to return,

A home against one’s self, a darkness,

An ease in which to live a moment’s life,

The moment of life’s love and fortune,

Free from everything else, free above all from thought. “

Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous, Vintage Books, 1990

DAVID HOCKNEY, 15th March 2021, Flowers in Jug, 2021 iPad painting printed on paper, 30 x 21 in @David Hockney Courtesy of the artist and LA Louver

DAVID HOCKNEY, 26th March 2021, Exotic Flowers, 2021 iPad painting printed on paper 30 x 21 in @David Hockney Courtesy of the artist and LA Louver