Hockney on Art
Paul Joyce
Hockney produces 'Joiners' 10 x 12 grids of polaroids which convey the way the eye sees scenes. hey have a narrative - you move through a story instead of from a fixed point. With a good painting, you keep looking at it, but you never do with a single photo, because it's the same every time. 'Joiners' have ambiguity.
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Leonardo da Vinci wrote a description of camera obscura (literally 'a darkened room') as light entering a tiny hole in the wall of a darkened room that projects an (inverted) image of whatever's outside. In 1550 discovered that a lens in the hole sharpened and brightened the image. With this discovery, easel painting flourished - before it had been scenery on walls, meant to look far away.
Cubism isn't about abstraction, it's another way of looking - seeing things from a different viewpoint.
There is no such thing as objective vision. We always choose to see what we want. If there is an object, we are drawn to that. If there is a face, we have to look at that. But we all have different ideas and interests, so we see things differently.
Picasso challenged idea that we only see things from a single fixed perspective. He wanted to show both front and back simultaneously.
Even when he was 90, Picasso still painted. A little guy, 5'6" tall, and used to stand, naked, painting gigantic female clitorises. (Can you imagine that in a an OAP home??)
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