David Hockney Vibes
Can an octogenarian teach us how to embrace the current fiction-writing-publishing landscape?
CREATIVE LAB ~ A monthly behind-the-scenes post where I unpack the creative threads behind my stories—what I’m reading, remembering, noticing, and shaping into fiction. Some of it comes from my classroom, some from travel and exploration, some from mornings with coffee. These are the methods and layers beneath the stories—with notes to spark your own creative work or engage in a related discussion in the comments.
Before leaving for our move to Japan this summer, I took a short trip to Paris to visit friends and catch some art. The highlight, besides the friends and a particular duck confit, was David Hockney 25 at Fondation Louis Vuitton1. Shit, I liked this show so much and so did my six-year-old that when he begged me to get the approximately 20 kg exhibition book, I pulled out my credit card straightaway even though we already had six full suitcases ready to fly from London to Asia.
Hockney is one of the artists with a near-universal appeal due to his vibrant colors and everyday, relatable subjects. But this doesn’t mean he’s a simple artist. According to the Tate, Hockney (b. 1937) is a “an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.” He has held studios in London, Bridlington, California, and - more recently - Normandy, which has given him a French appeal with two large shows in Paris in the last five years.
It’s easy to mistake this public appeal as predictable and perhaps even uninventive. However, I’m inspired by the subtlety with which he approaches the reinvention of traditional paintings and am thinking about the way this relates to my writing2. He created ‘reverse perspective’ in the 80s after visiting China and being inspired by asymmetry in landscape painting. He has used Polaroids and iPads in fresh ways, And, while some may not see the political in his work, he was painting “homoerotic joy” in California before homosexuality was decriminalized in his native England.
I’ve always been a fan of his work, first for the core aesthetics of color and line he does so incredibly well. He’s known to have synaesthesia (he sees color when he listens to music), which might explain it, but he also spends a lot of time looking and experimenting with seemingly simple shifts in the way he creates art. I recall being wowed by something of his at Art Basel a couple of years ago: yes, the mural-sized painting of a gallery within a gallery (the artist seated and smoking with a wry smile in the corner) but also an A4 size colored pencil sketch of an onion. That onion made of just a few lines has imprinted in my mind forever.
The year before my onion encounter, I had visited Paris’ Musée de l’Orangerie to witness Hockney’s iPad paintings of the seasons during the pandemic. “A Year in Normandy” demonstrated something incredible to witness. Something that I had read about in the transcribed discussion between Hockney and art critic Martin Gayford: Spring Cannot be Cancelled. A painter toward the end of his career was still interested in nature and the seasons, in the purity of the world around him in Normandy, and in the human condition (especially loneliness as amplified during the pandemic). He was still interested in certain color palettes he recycled and refreshed over the years, still interested in responding to the centuries of art history before him. But he had also embraced technology both for its convenience and ease as well as its newness. He had not stopped at static scenes created with new brushstrokes or colors available to him. Instead, the technology inspired and enabled him to make a 90-meter horizontal scroll (partly in response to the nearby Bayeux Tapestry, 70 meters long) as well as moving images, sometimes depicting the process, other times the movement of nature, the ephemeral.
I am constantly inspired by this man and his work. And so — like many other things in my life — I started to think of it as metaphor for my own acts of writing. In fact in this case however, much of it is not metaphor at all but transference of creative processes and contemplative notions of the way we make art and what art has to do with ourselves (both as creator and audience).
autoportrait / autofiction
A self portrait is translated to autoportrait in French, which may help one to understand the elusive nature of autofiction as ‘self fiction’.3 However, one might argue that all fictions contain pieces of the self, no matter how surreal, uncanny, or distant in identification the characters may seem. Milan Kundera writes in the novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (France, 1984):
The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own ‘I’ ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become. (p. 215)
And in this way, Hockney’s portraits of himself are everywhere in his work, not only in works like the above montage of self-portraits made into single work of art. Whether or not his face or body are present, you can see his hand, his mind through the movement of line, whether brushstroke or digital swipe, through color and shape, through recycled and reimagined subjects. But this doesn’t mean we know him or how to interpret him (or that we should). Instead it gives us pieces of the kaleidoscopic view of his presence.
This is what fiction does, but autofiction — in my opinion — perhaps varies less in its use of biographical fact and more due to its use of the self as subject. It is the method of the writer’s mind rather than the facts of output. It is the play of reality as lived through one’s consciousness, which includes imagination.
Not many artists have been drawing similar themes and the same people for more than sixty years. What I am trying to do is to bring people closer to something, because art is about sharing. You wouldn’t be an artist unless you wanted to share an experience, a thought.
-David Hockney, catalogue book from FLV, p. 8
Take the novella I’ve been publishing pieces of lately: The Man from Brooklyn (back next week). I’m not a “Man” nor am I “from Brooklyn” by any means. Nor have most any of the experiences in the fiction happened to me. But pieces of Maine, where I lived for four years, and narratives of nature, writing, academia, distance relationships, and more have echoes of my lived experience that haunt the pages. It is memory that shifts over time and it is imagination from the sparks of truth that come from the way we filter our happenings and observations.
mise-en-abyme
If we see the world as metaphor, the layers of our conscious minds are endless. Art is present in everyday life and vice versa.
Mise-en-abyme is the concept of placing something into infinity, or the abyss, through its layers. Visually, it is standing between two mirrors (think of the elevator scene in Inception). In literature, the clearest example is the notion of a play-within-a-play (i.e. Hamlet or A Midsummer Night’s Dream) or various postmodern plays with metafiction.
Part of the layering of Hockney is his deep understanding and fascination with the history of art, a narrative he also questions and attempts to redefine at times. His “Great Wall” of art history was on display at the recent Paris show. This wall of artists over time was created in one of his California studies and informs his work. It also might serve as a kind of reminder of the greatness that came before him like a well curated bookcase might do for a writer.
While I have long studied literature both at universities and in my own journeys (of mind and travel), I find the road map of literary history is still fluid. Each time I teach Hamlet or Jane Eyre or Kafka on the Shore, there are new layers of significance that come from my discoveries and those of my students. Like Hockney, I see these histories as dynamic layers that enter my own stories, pushing them and questioning them in a cycle where the starting point is now unclear.
The other kind of mise-en-abyme Hockney plays with is more literal and adjacent to narratological structures of postmodernism that often contain aspects of metafiction. He inserts himself directly into many of his works to trick the audience and make us feel like he is in the studio with us. In “Play within a Play within a Play,” he depicts himself painting the same image that is before us.
The effect of all this is an infinite questioning of reality and of consciousness. It is playful often, yes, but it makes us think about the role of the artist, of attending gallery shows, and of the autofiction/autoportrait qualities I discussed before.
As a writer, I think this playful element is important: when I find myself entering a fiction I am creating (even in covert ways), I am reminded not to take myself too seriously, to play at life. Hockney’s curiosity at our understanding through a mirrored view of observations, of our interpretations of art, gives me the freedom to work in seemingly endless circles that help me consider my place in time and space while also lifting me out of time and space completely.
reinventing mediums
I like to look for lessons everywhere. I guess you could say I live life in metaphor; that’s not to say I eschew reality. Rather, I try to discover the extra layers that exist around us simultaneously.
David Hockney does this. He gives us everyday scenes: nature, swimming pools, portraits, seasons changing. With these scenes, however, his lines tell a story. His color, too. And — in the more recent years of his iPad art — movement and/or pixilation likewise mimic some processing mechanisms of the mind and change reality into surreality. The iPad has become his kind of sketchbook: “For him, depicting the world is an ongoing moment. So the iPhone or the iPad is the perfect media for this” (Hans Werner Holzwarth, book editor and Hockney collaborator).
To some extent, all art does this. Is it surprising that this 88 year old is still reinventing and inspiring without giving up the traditions of the practice of painting? Perhaps it would be for others, but this follows the ever-evolving nature of Hockney’s work. I think of Paul Auster and Cormac McCarthy as recent writers who did something like this until their deaths.
There’s a discourse among contemporary writers (and publishers) about ways to reinvent from the inside out, without alienating your readers or abandoning the aspects of literature that you love. We see a lot of this (subjectively enjoyable) tension in any postmodern text and (perhaps more successfully) in texts that also include movement between modern and postmodern features, whether stylistic and aesthetic or political and ontological.
Is Hockney’s use of the iPad like digital literary publication? In some ways this is a less interesting question for me. I want to think more about the meaning of this work for writers. His work (like the one above) is closed in nature, not hyperlinked nor interactive, yet it moves and breathes on the screen. A moving aesthetic could be produced in online publication. I think also about the way this format of publication and curation could create a kind of piece-by-piece ‘scroll’ like that of Hockney’s. And in terms of process, there is of course more room for returning to something and shifting, adding layers (aesthetic or subject related).
You can make these aspects your own. It teaches us not to be afraid of digital specifically but also that we can go back to classic mediums or subjects (painting portraits and landscapes in Hockney’s case, writing fiction about personal discovery in mine). These don’t have to take one trajectory, but many cycles of experimentation and observation that can last to our final years.
questions
How much of your self is in the art you create? (How much should be, and what should be revealed to the reader/observer?)
How do the layers of art history / literature / cinematic history (etc.) influence your work or make their way into the art you observe?
How can a fiction writer use digital publication to enhance their art or play with a subject/aesthetic (also a kind of potential enhancement)? Why might one choose to do this and continue to use traditional methods side-by-side?
Other posts featuring some discussion about Hockney:
Check out the story of the building designed by Frank Gehry here. It’s quite a cool spot — amazing building in which you can visit the special rooftop and take a glass elevator, grounds of the Bois de Bologne (home of Rolland Garros / the French Open) with plenty for all ages to do, a delicious hot dog truck, a massive Takashi Murakami sculpture (which is also LV marketing, of course), and pathways leading to ponds and cafes all around. At one such pond-cafe, I had the pleasure of meeting fellow fiction writer Alexander Ipfelkofer and discuss the publication of his new book, multilingualism, and parenting.
Many places you can go to learn more about Hockney, including his interviews, but a starting point might be these articles from Art Basel, Bozar, and Le Monde. Learn about aspects like his printmaking technique here or his understanding of Vanvitelli’s Camera Obscura (and the Hockney-Falco thesis of Art History).
I go into autofiction a bit more looking at Annie Ernaux’s writing in this article/podcast:
Interesting piece. I didn’t know that Hockney worked with Polaroids. I also enjoy the playful side of literature, not only in form, intertextuality and meta-layers, but also in the language itself. What exactly are you referring to when you talk about Paul Auster? In my next post, I’m going to write something about him and his fictional art and collaboration with Sophie Calle.
And to answer your last question: I’m going to experiment a bit with Substack, to give the many references and philosophical winks in my novel a place within a kind of footnote system, which I still need to think through. I'm tied to Substack's limitations, but I also see many possibilities, just like Hockney with his iPad work.
Extremely interesting and thought provoking. I am a lover of Hockney’s art too. Thank you Kate