The Road Across the Wolds by David Hockney.
This is the case of the exhibition David Hockney : A broader vision , which will be at the ** Bilbao Guggenheim Museum ** until September 30, and where you can see oil paintings, charcoal, drawings made with iPad or iPhone, sketchbooks and digital videos.
This exhibition clearly places Hockney in the tradition of British painters who focus their attention on the landscape, like Turner or Constable. After his long stay in the United States, Hockney decided to return to Yorkshire, his hometown, and it was in 2007 that the Royal Academy proposed the preparation of the exhibition. His gaze rediscovers the passing of the seasons, the transformation of the vegetation and the changes in light throughout the day, in a vibrant vision full of color that the 75-year-old artist captures with ease on canvas.
The Pearblossom Highway, April 11-18, 1986 No. 1 by David Hockney.
Hockney feels young and full of energy. Always elegant with an eccentric touch , his look and his ironic smile focus on the now, on the moment lived, without taking into account the past or the future, and this is expressed convincingly in the video that illustrates the exhibition as a documentary . A now that multiplies his effect in the most magnetic and suggestive part of the exhibition, the paintings that capture the live nature of Yorkshire.
An explosion of colors that gradually transform as you observe each painting, each perspective taken in the same places at different times of the year. Highlights The arrival of spring in Woldgate in 2011, in a large format, with 32 canvases completed with 51 drawings of the same environments made from January to June. The numerous representations of El Tunel -a forest road flanked by trees and shrubs that when they bloom form a corridor of vegetation- or the exhaustive exploration of the behavior of rain, wind, snow or sun, in a representation of the cycle of life through nature.
David Hockney with one of his works.
But this trip becomes, if possible, even more intense when you stop to watch the series of hypnotic films that he has made using up to 18 cameras. The images are broadcast on multiple screens, bringing the pictorial world of Hockney to life.
Looking at some of the huge paintings, you almost feel like you can enter the canvas and walk through it. After visiting the exhibition, it is not surprising that the desire to explore its forests and meadows is awakened in the viewer. For it, nothing better than heading to the county of Yorkshire, in the north of England , where you can visit cities like Leeds, Sheffield, Hull or York, without forgetting Bradford, the painter's hometown. During these years, Hockney carried out laborious field work in his jeep, and a trail has even been created for visitors, the “ Hockney Trail ”.
Sunset in Yorkshire.
Also worth visiting Salt Mill , where one of the most complete collections of his works is exhibited. You have to go to Kilham to enter its tunnel of vegetation, and there the traveler can stay at the “boutique” hotel Kilham Hall, which two years ago won the Conde Nast Johansens Most Excellent Small Hotel award in Great Britain and Ireland.
Finally, to complete the journey, Thixendale : there you have to look for the three trees with which he developed one of his main series. It is, therefore, about an exciting circuit for landscape lovers and, above all, of the colorful and energetic painting of David Hockney, who in one of his famous phrases states: "It is not necessary to believe in what an artist says, but in what he does." So we follow in his footsteps and delve into his pictorial or audiovisual journeys exhibited at the Guggenheim in Bilbao or into the reality of the geography that inspires his creations.