David Hockney

Road to Malibu, from 1988, is a delightfully bold and brightly colorful landscape in which David Hockney cleverly carves up the pictorial space into a series of planes: strong blues for sea and sky, lush verdant greens and bright yellows and pinks for the land and cityscape.  The sweeping shapes drive the viewer's eye across the surface of the canvas and force perspective out into the distance.  However they also have very intricate patterned surfaces, which make them playful and decorative much like Van Gogh's painterly swirls and Matisse's cut-outs.  The patterned surfaces define the foreground from the background, giving the landscape both volume and depth in a series of shifting perspectives.  Reminiscent of a stage set design, which Hockney was also extremely involved with in the late 1980s, the three adjoining canvases are constructed in a series of spaces which can be read from multiple directions and vantage points.  This imaginative view allows Road to Malibu to be extremely complex in its interpretation of perspective and reality, yet simultaneously direct in its bright rich color and geometric simplicity as the artist guides the viewer from his studio in the hills along the coast to his smaller studio in Malibu.

Having gradually developed a fascination with the eye of the camera, Hockney became preoccupied with photography and in 1982 produced his first photo-collage; a montage of snapped images assembled like a 'map' that realistically documented how the eye sweeps across a scene in a geographic location.  With this new working medium, Hockney radically broke with the traditional notion of a single central perspective which had come to dominate Western art since the Renaissance.  Hockney was clearly looking to the innovative use of perspective and flattening of space that Henri Matisse explored early in the century. Adopting a kind of "non-perspective" space, Hockney assumed that the viewer was not located in front of the picture, but within it.  In the mid-1980s, Hockney was able to translate, into painterly terms, the insights he had gained from his work with photography, leading him to fundamentally new ways of using pictorial space.  As he stated, "I realized that this sort of picture came closer to how we actually see, which is to say, not all-at-once but rather in discrete, separate glimpses which we then build up into our continuous experience of the world." (David Hockney in Lawrence Weschler, Cameraworks: David Hockney, New York, 1984, p. 11)