Very interested in different visions of pastoral England since we've been working on I Packed This Myself.
At the David Hockney show at the Royal Academy last night - was stunned by the whirlwind of colour and the excitement with which he re-engages with British landscape (after the California years). Colour and line transform the Yorkshire hills and dale. This is a new way of looking at the world. Double East Yorkshire 1998 was painted after six months in Yorkshire with a terminally ill friend.
At the David Hockney show at the Royal Academy last night - was stunned by the whirlwind of colour and the excitement with which he re-engages with British landscape (after the California years). Colour and line transform the Yorkshire hills and dale. This is a new way of looking at the world. Double East Yorkshire 1998 was painted after six months in Yorkshire with a terminally ill friend.
There is a lot of emotion in these paintings.
A few years later, colours become more subdued and traditional.
Mid Summer East Yorkshire 2004 reminds me of the tapestry created by my local church in Cornwall to mark the millennium. There's a sense of stitching things together to try and make sense of them.
For the church tapestry, women in the congregation each designed a square and sewed them together into a huge wall hanging. Will have to take some pictures this week. That was a vision of rural life at the time, as was this.
Very notable that there are no figures in any of these landscape paintings.
