Drawing with a video camera

Stills from Woldgate 7 November 2010 11:30 AM (left) and Woldgate 26 November 2010 11 AM (right). Credit: ©David Hockney

Always an innovator, David Hockney has been getting up to new technological tricks. In the 80s he used polaroids to make large collages of subjects like a road in the desert or the Brooklyn Bridge. He was a pioneer of using digital cameras in his art. Now he's mounting an array of high-definition video cameras on the side of a car and driving down a quiet country road in Yorkshire. The results are shown on 18 screens - in two groups, with one set of screens showing a time delay - of seconds, or of entire seasons. The cameras are set at different angles and focal lengths, so he is providing a way of seeing something very intensely.


He calls these works drawings rather than photographs. "There's always a lot more to see", he says. 


Hockney has written a book (Secret Knowledge) on how early painters used a camera obscura as a drawing tool, and is interested in all sorts of technology - a paintbrush is a technological device, he contends. He now uses an iPad as a drawing tool, and has printed out some of those drawings on a large scale, using a program to prevent them from pixelating. These will be shown at the Royal Academy next year. 


'Hockney started using photographs as a basis for paintings in the late 1960s,' the article says. 'But he became dissatisfied with the direction his work was taking, which in some cases veered toward a form of photorealism. By the '80s he was conducting a personal research program into the nature of pictorial and photographic space. He began to entertain the idea that what the camera sees and what the eye sees are in some ways fundamentally different. "Most people feel that the world looks like the photograph," he says. "I've always assumed that the photograph is nearly right, but that little bit it misses by makes it miss by a mile. This is what I grope at." '


It's interesting to read, amid an account of Hockney's technological innovations in making his art, that photocopied work can be made uncopiable: 'Hockney has been adept at using new technology to find new ways to draw. In the 1980s he used early color photocopiers and fax machines to make art. Using the fax, he distributed art by telephone; with the photocopier he made prints that, paradoxically, could not be photocopied (if you make an intense black by putting the paper through the machine four times, it cannot be replicated by a single copying process).'


The author of the article, Martin Gayford, has written "A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney", to be published in October.