At last , on Thursday we finally made it to the Hockney exhibition - well worth the anticipation. The queues were still snaking around the courtyard as we left at 9.30 and it was very crowded but as the work is generally large, we had no problem seeing and there was a real buzz and sense of participation. We spent over 20 mins enthralled in the film gallery, not only by the landscape shots but the dance sequence which came as a surprise ( and met with applause when completed!) But mainly I was spellbound.by his draughtsmanship, mark making and use of colour.
I'd seen his watercolours 'Hand, Eye, Heart' several years ago at Somerset House and it was great to see them again with their equivalent in oils. He really is master of observation and in the 'trees and totems' gallery it was wonderful to see his beautiful charcoal drawings alongside the large scale, more abstracted paintings derived from them.
I was less excited by his ipad drawings than I thought I would be - while very skillful , the marks were very mechanical in comparison to even a simple pencil line where different pressure can give varying width and depth.
On the tube coming home however I did experiment again with 'paint pad' on my Nokia phone - only 48 colours, 3 pen sizes and spray can and an eraser, it works best colouring in existing photos(these are from Weymouth) .
When I was talking about ipads as a sketchbook alternative with Ian, he pointed out that as my normal sketchbooks are much smaller (A5 or A6) I probably would get very limited use out it.
At work before I left for the Hockney exhibition we had a demonstration of a new camera for our Leica binocular microscope - when we were upgraded from windows 2000 (!) to Windows 7 it was too much of a leap for our existing one so we've been without a camera for nearly a year . At last I can take decent pictures of my mosses. Technology having advance, one of the features of the software is being able to combine up to 10 shots at different focal points into one image. So instead of having this photo of Weissia where the tips are in focus but the background is blurred, I'll be able to take photos where everything is pin sharp and almost 3D. Now that really is cool!
And yet there's a parallel between the fancy new camera and drawing on iPad -- both bits of technology involve the learning of new skills (not necessarily a bad thing, though!) -- and before the technology was available, the activities in question (producing art on the one hand, and record keeping on the other) were done with the "simple" expedient of drawing...
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