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Where Light Never Ends: David Hockney and the Freedom of Seeing
Where Light Never Ends: David Hockney and the Freedom of Seeing David Hockney never reduced art to a mere market object. Pools, light, human faces and Yorkshire's rainy hills - all of these were, for him, declarations of freedom. Hockney's story is the portrait of an artist who didn't fit into the system and wrote his own rules. The early 1960s were years when the art world was shaped in the shadow of abstract expressionism. The massive canvases of Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock had occupied museum walls and art critics' agendas. Color and form were sufficient; the human figure was almost considered a sin. Hockney did not bow to this pressure. While the majority of his peers at the Royal College of Art turned to the abstract, he walked in the opposite direction. "I consciously chose to abandon abstract expressionism and return to the figure," he said. This decision was an expression not of his career, but of his identity; and Hockney never looked back from this decision. The Love Pictures series that emerged during this period was not merely a poetic expression of homosexual desire. Lines from Walt Whitman, graffiti copied from subway toilets, numerical codes and scribbled symbols — all of these were the secret alphabet of an artist challenging the system. The "3.18" in the painting "Doll Boy" or the number "138" in "Hairy Legs" were not just riddles; they were the only safe form of revealing an identity that was considered criminal at the time. When Hockney first set foot in Los Angeles in 1963, he found himself there. This is not an exaggerated expression; it's a biographical fact. After Bradford's gloomy weather and London's competitive art environment, California offered him a world that made color, light and open identity possible. Poo...
