This March 11th a 1980 David Hockney print of a swimming pool will go on auction at Phillips. It’s a “problem to represent water” says the artist “because it can be anything…any colour”. Here Hockney does so with stylistic hallmarks that have become vernacular in contemporary art over his long and hugely successful career. In this print, water is literally denoted through waving lines and is superbly coloured blue, another shorthand for water. It’s estimated to go between $25,000 and $35,000, while another painting, ‘Nichols Canyon’ (1980) auctioned in 2020 was sold for $35.5M.
There’s an exuberance in Hockney’s work that has engendered an enthusiasm in its reception. It provokes us to consider what are the promising qualities in emerging artists – who are within reach of many more collectors. These artists aren’t copies of this seminal artist (“there’s no such thing as a copy, really” quips Hockney) but invigorated by his work, using it as a point of reference and departure for their own.
With a career beginning in the 1960s Hockney is an artist who to this day – in his 80s – continues to innovate, whose work is some of the most widely shown, widely known, and highly valued. Lily Senner, New Blood artist based in Newcastle, notes of the pool print that: “You can feel the depth and coolness of the water, yet on a formal level we enjoy the tactile mark making and vivid, high-key colour scheme.” This print shows how Hockney can take the quotidian – even the banal – and render it as the source of shared experience, delight, and awe. As Lily puts it, it’s an “excellent example of how successful Hockney is at creating sensual yet visually playful scenes.”
Lily also uses her gift for colour to the same joyful, liberating effect. The intense hues that saturate her scenes make them pulsate, transfiguring them into an amplified sensory experience whilst carrying out sophisticated perspective and depth. It is the quality of “honesty” that Lily attributes to Hockney, in an artist who “captures something extraordinary within relatively ordinary landscapes” that means viewers respond, again and again, to such works.
‘Nichols Canyon’ is also set in California, but for many represents a turning point in Hockney’s career into panoramic landscapes, and is considered his first mature work. It’s exciting to see an artist’s style develop against the consistent backdrop of a particular place, as can be said of Scottish artist Yasmin Davidson, whose move to the Hebridean island of North Uist heralded the current phase of her work. In these paintings it’s manifest the artist is thrilled by her environment, immersed in its vastness.
The surprising colour choices render this, and are pulled off in bold but complementary combinations. We never forget that we are looking at an image, however truly evocative of the scenery these paintings are. As with Hockney’s series of canyon paintings, there is a monumental quality to Yasmin’s paintings: an interest in the landscape’s memory, its geography shaped by time and human hands. Degrees of realism, brilliant colouring, and the perspectival sense of moving through the landscape, give Hockney’s canyon and Davidon’s Uist alike the preppossing quality that the real and the fantastic are one and the same.
An artist who can look at nature with fresh eyes will often find a warm reception. Niall Stevenson’s idiosyncratic renderings of the Scottish landscape he traverses near his base in Edinburgh, demonstrate an attentiveness to surroundings, which translates into a distinct aesthetic. ‘Study for a Landscape (S)’ has a provisional quality, capturing that seasonal feeling of being on the cusp of change, the new spaciousness of the light; also the subject of Hockney’s major exhibit ‘The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020’ at the Royal Academy.
For this cycle of work Hockney embraced new technologies, using his iPad to make images then blown up to a much bigger size to be displayed. In an interview with Artforum, Wolfgang Timmons said of these pieces that “even if the work celebrates new media and technology” when placed next to the more classic oil paintings by the artist they acted as “foils, to underline, by contrast, the masterly position and unsurpassable value of actual oil on canvas.” Witnessing how an artist is in dialogue with tradition can often be a hallmark of their seriousness, the thoroughness of their training and willingness to experiment; in short, the potential longevity of their work’s value. Niall’s gestural brushwork, and mountain seen through the trees summon Cezzane’s paintings of Montaigne Sainte-Victoir but nonetheless feels contemporary: it’s oil paint as it could only be rendered after the advent of the digital screen.
“Hockney’s art is often seen as a conversation with artists of the past”, writes the Guardian, “Even when painting the Yorkshire Wolds, say, he can’t help alluding to landscapes painted by artists before him.” This conversation between artists, down the ages and across continents, is a way to to measure their uniquenesses as well as their shared successes. This landscape, this lens, is a means by which to discover the quality of the new; the emerging artists of today to invest in for the future.
Words by Maggie