Lisa Thorpe

Never Stop Exploring

I went to the David Hockney exhibit at the De Young Museum in San Francisco this weekend (Hockney exhibit).  It was a delight.  I assumed the show was a retrospective because Hockney is 76 years old and has been a big name in the art world for decades but I was wrong.  This was a huge show with giant pieces and all new work.  Almost every thing was done in the last 10 years and much in the last year. The was a whole room of large charcoal drawings of woods moving from winter to spring all done in the spring of 2013, one painting in the entry to the show was dated October 2013, this painting is just a few weeks old!  This is an artist who keeps evolving and experimenting.  He was an early adopter of the iPad as sketchbook and there were many examples of his digital works printed as giant pieces, there was a room of video collages, as well as huge painting done traditionally with oils or watercolor.  It was inspiring to see how incredibly prolific and open David Hockney is as an artist.  He doesn’t seem to limit himself in any way following ideas and techniques honing each in a very characteristic way so that no matter the medium the works had his stamp, his sense of humor, his color drama, his expansive point of view.

Sometimes I doubt my own wandering creative spirit – one-day painting landscapes the next drawing birds, in the morning sewing in the afternoon designing fabric, and sitting down to draw on my iPad in the evening. I have had misgivings about my nomadic creative character, perhaps if I just stuck with painting landscapes I’d be getting somewhere I’ve been known to say….but I can’t, I just can’t, I get board, I want to try something new. Half the fun of creating art for me is solving the puzzle of a medium, seeing if I can wrestle my will onto a new surface.  So thank you David Hockney you give me courage to continue on my rambling ways, exploring and expanding, unraveling and revealing and always, always making something new.

The pieces I’m sharing in this post were all drawn on my iPad then printed onto lightly gessoed pages of a large old art book.