David Hockney:
An Influential Artist in Both Traditional and Digital Media

Before examining the works of David Hockney and their influence on me and upon this final project, I would first like to look at the more general issue of Digital Art as Art and the legitimate use of it by more traditional artists like Hockney as well as by a new generation of artists for whom working digitally is as normative as painting on walls and boards and canvases has been for artists throughout past centuries, even millennia. Over seventy years ago, in the conclusion to his classic work Meaning of Art, Herbert Read addressed the issue of the validity of artists' utilizing new technology in the creation of art. Concerning the transition to and assimilation of new materials and methods of creation Read stated the following:

The ultimate values of art transcend the individual and his time and circumstance....the artist will use materials placed in his hands by the circumstances of his time: at one period he will scratch on the walls of his cave, at another he will build or decorate a temple or a cathedral, at another he will paint on canvas....The true artist is indifferent to the materials and conditions imposed upon him. He accepts any conditions, so long as they can be used to express his will-to-form. Then in the wider mutations of history his efforts are magnified or diminished, taken up or dismissed, by forces which he cannot predict, and which have very little to do with the values of which he [or she] is the exponent. Read, Herbert. Meaning of Art (London, Pelican Books, 1954), p.191.

Writing those words around 1930 Read could not possibly have envisioned the technology that has been placed in our hands or the seemingly infinite variety of ways in which it could be used. Since the advent of the computer and computer graphics capabilities artists have been making the kind of transition that Read pointed to. David Hockney is one of those artists who has successfully made this transition from traditional media to digital media, currently incorporating both in his works. He thus has become a sort of bridge into the present era.

As to Hockney's influence upon me, I have always liked his works, especially his landscape paintings of the British countryside. In particular I like his use of color and his exploration of a variety of subjects and forms. Several years ago I became aware of his use of digital technology as a prt of his creative process. Moving beyond the use of photographs as a source for compositions, he employed scanners and computer images as part of a sort of creative feed-back loop in which paintings and digital production and reproduction informed and inspired one another. More recently he has begun "painting" images on an iPhone (http://andybutler.net/blog/2009/07/01/david-hockney-phone-art-free-download/). He has for me thus become an example of an artist who has successfully incorporated digital technology into his works without abandoning the traditional forms of drawing and painting.

His influence on my own work, in particular this final project, is perhaps more indirect than direct. My own paintings of the countryside and seaside in Cornwall were actually begun before I was aware of Hockney's British landscapes; his paintings thus became a confirmation of my own works as well as an inspiration to continue and develop those themes. His use of digital technology encouraged me to explore the possibilities of developing those images via the computer. I plan to further explore those possibilities. The final project gives me the opportunity to incorporate some of my previously created pieces (a scanned painting, a photographed painting, and a computer-generated seascape), into their geographical context, thus reconnecting them with their place of origin and communicating that experience to others -- those paintings will emerge from a map of Cornwall just as they were created out of my experience of being in Cornwall.