Also posted below, a portion of Susan Sontag's well-known book "On Photography".
Monday, July 14, 2014
David Hockney and Why We Take Photos
Also posted below, a portion of Susan Sontag's well-known book "On Photography".
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Personally, I love saturated colors and being able to use them while creating a piece. I would like to be able to figure out a way to use saturation in landscapes that works for me. One of my struggles with art is that I am always torn between making things look realistic versus abstract. By using colors that are saturated, I could do both (somewhat). David Hockney’s paintings stand out among other landscape paintings for this reason.
ReplyDeleteOn the other side, Susan Sontag’s ideas about photography give an interesting view to David Hockney’s paintings. Susan speaks about how photographs can serve as evidence. So it is interesting to think about Hockney’s paintings and how he alters them away from being ‘evidence-worthy’. However, now there are so many ways to alter photos as well. There are programs to saturate photos and to completely change their entire color composition. With this, photographs are moving further away from evidence and can follow in Hockney’s example of becoming an interpretation using different ‘color effects’.
*Danielle Sargent*
Personally, I enjoy Hockney's style of exaggeration and saturated color. He takes the traditional idea of a landscape, which can sometimes appear like a photograph, and makes it abstract and almost surreal. A traditional landscape has a very realistic quality that allows the viewer to be almost transported in a way, to the scene depicted. This is very much like a photograph, where we as viewers can look at the scene and feel a connectedness to something we recognize.
ReplyDeleteIn conjunction with Sontag's article, in which she talks about photography working as a sort of "evidence" from life events, Hockney's abstract depictions represent this "evidence", but are altered. Likewise, modern day photography can also be manipulated into being abstract and surreal, much like other forms of art.
I also liked that Sontag touched upon the use of photography as a way to sooth or assuage feelings of anxiety. In today's society, we have the ability to capture a moment literally at our fingertips, which while some may use soley to capture 'evidence", others may use photography in a more artistic sense, or to escape the anxiety of reality. Much like a painting, or the act of painting, which for many, can be an escape from the anxieties of the modern world. In this way, I think that Hockney's pieces are a place between the real and fictional, with their almost dreamlike quality and abstraction.
Candace Honecker
"We know we didn't have much time, its rather ephemeral, it doesn't last long" It is so interesting to hear him say this especially in juxtaposition to the Susan Sontag article. To create is to collect information, process it, and relay that information whichever way the artist sees fit. Which in David Hockney's case, is interpreting the literally changing landscapes of Northern Europe as massively saturated specific moments in time. The bold colors act as a way to record the dramatic interpretation of exactly what was there when the artist saw it; something that due to the nature of the subject matter, is more likely than not the exact way it was when viewed by Hockey. Sontag states, "Photography gives people an imaginary possession over a past that is unreal" interestingly enough what can be said of the truthfulness of any artistic medium?
ReplyDeleteIn David Hockney's video, I love the use of exaggeration and saturation to evoke emotion and interest in his artwork. He said that he tried to find simple and subtle landscapes, and in his abstract art he played with the colors to give the landscape a timeless feel. I love how his artwork focuses on exaggeration and surrealism that connects people to the dreamlike state of nature, rather than capturing things seen by the naked eye. His artwork reminds me of memories tied with imagination and creativity, which is quite different from Susan Sontag's view of photography.
ReplyDeleteIn Susan Sontag's article, she talks about the timeliness of photography, and how it captures a specific moment or memory as it was. David Hockney's art works around the surreal memories, while Susan Sontag focuses on the realism of memories, allowing people to remember things as they actually are. As a photographer, I found this article extremely interesting as it gives me a new perspective of why people photograph and inspires me to include Huckney's dreamlike memories with Sontag's realistic memories.
Peri Levine
David Hockney's landscape paintings evoke a playful emotion in me. The saturated colors feel childish and when used to depict a landscape they bring me back to my childhood when we would play outside. I also love that he uses a tablet to sketch out some of his landscapes, I immediately thought of the Windows program paint and how he uses the same colors I used on that computer program so many year ago. The use of non-local color is what makes these pieces stand out, they become surreal and almost fantasy like because David is staying away from the assumed green and blue hues of a landscape.
ReplyDeleteSusan Sontag talked about how photography is a means of remembrance. How a photograph, unlike a painting at any scale, can capture so much more of the moment. She also touches on the use of photography in the home and how it is used to capture those precious family memories. She states "to take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are" encoring that we can encourage emotion for eternity by capturing a moment's observation