Where Silences Begin Poem by gershon hepner

Where Silences Begin



On location now in Yorkshire, not
in Hollywood, he says he isn’t bored,
far from the pools he painted on a plot
of paradise in art I can’t afford.
Gesticulating with a cigarette,
gregarious and most enthusiastic,
it’s clear this artist doesn’t get upset
by new inventions that provide fantastic
incentives to create without a brush
and paint. Though he is partly deaf, he hears
a vision others cannot see; the hush
surrounding him bypasses challenged ears,
providing focus that enable seyes
to see what others cannot, because sounds
detract from vivid visions the surprise
an artist has to have when he astounds
himself by reproducing what he sees
as if aware of them the first time in
his life. For Hockney sounds are holes in cheese,
the music played where silences begin.

Inspired by an article in the October 18 NYT, by Carol King, written in Bridlington, England, where David Hockney now lives (“Hockney’s Long Road Home: A transplanted artists left the pools of Southern California for the landscapes of his native Yorkshire”) :
IT was a brilliantly sunny autumn day in East Yorkshire, and the artist David Hockney was taking me for a drive through the countryside. “What it is I’m going to show you is an alleyway of trees, ” he said in his gruff Yorkshire burr as he turned his open-topped Audi roadster off the one-lane road into an even narrower byway bordered by swaying beech, sycamore and ash trees. “When I moved up here, I recognized this is really very rare and beautiful.” Because Mr. Hockney has been going deaf since his early 40s, he tends toward opinionated monologues, often delivered as he gesticulates with a cigarette. But at 72, even with hearing aids in both ears, he remains lively, gregarious and enthusiastic — especially when it comes to looking at the world, thinking about the world and making art out of what he sees. As we drew close to the trees, he fretted over the sun’s position. “The lighting is made for going the other way, ” he complained. Then he slowed down so we had time to appreciate each tree individually, and began issuing orders about how to look. “Watch! ” he called out. “The ash tree now comes in — look at the shape of it! And now then on the right, another tree. There’s a point where each one stands on its own. There. Now. It’s surrounded by sky. Now the next one, and it stands on its own. You see? ” It was as though he were giving director’s notes. Eventually the trees grew small behind us, and Mr. Hockney’s clear blue eyes, shielded by a white linen cap, turned back to the road. Although he had filmed and photographed the alleyway on many occasions, and studied it from every direction, he still hadn’t managed make “a marvelous painting of my experience, ” he said. “I haven’t quite figured out yet, simply because it’s not one viewpoint. But I will.”
In 2005 Mr. Hockney — temporarily, he says — left Hollywood, where he had lived full time since 1978, to transform the manicured green and golden slopes, woods and farmland of the East Yorkshire landscape into spare, quickly worked compositions charged with pink, orange and violet….It was immediately clear that — his new passion for plein-air painting aside — Mr. Hockney has a new love: digital technology. Around the room hung multiple photographs by Jonathan Wilkinson, his full-time technology assistant, of artworks that were also hanging on the walls. They were so exact that it was often hard to tell the originals from the photographs.The confusion was intensified because some of the originals actually began life as photographs — like the two 27-foot-long friezes depicting a group of trees Mr. Hockney noticed at the edge of town, which he photographed individually, then collaged together and detailed in Photoshop. Others were made at home on a Macintosh, including portraits he painted earlier this year using Photoshop and a Wacom tablet. (A selection will be at Pace Prints.) Near a table covered with video cameras, someone had tacked up printouts of Mr. Hockney’s iPhone paintings. Mr. Hockney also uses the computer to compose his paintings, either to help him step back and regard the whole of a multipanel work or to refine individual canvases. He often tries out colors and ideas on a photograph of an unfinished painting, or plays around with a JPEG of the image in Photoshop. Afterward he returns to the studio to put his ideas on canvas. “People have asked me, ” he said, “ ‘Isn’t it boring in Bridlington, a little isolated seaside town? ’ And I say: ‘Not for us. We all think it’s very exciting, because it is in my studio and it is in my house.’ ” Mr. Hockney is now working toward a mammoth show of these landscapes for the Royal Academy in London, to open in January 2012. “They came to me, ” he said. “I went to look at the rooms and thought: ‘My God, what an opportunity. We’ll do it! ’ So I need this great big studio.” Yet he also has no intention of giving up California. He still has his house in the Hollywood Hills, he said, not to mention his office and archives on Santa Monica Boulevard and his green card.“I would say I’m on location here, ” he said, laughing wryly. “That’s what we say in Hollywood.”

10/18/09

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