The snow is piled several feet deep outside my window in the Catskill mountains, but my mind is far away in 1970’s Los Angeles. I’m attracted to the snow for the way it covers holes, pinecones, and rocks. Snow flattens the topography just like water creates an even surface over the depth of a pool. I am thinking this way because I recently watched the 1974 film by Jack Hazan about David Hockney : A Bigger Splash.
There are currently three documents about David Hockney floating around my mind : A Bigger Splash, Secret Knowledge, and David Hockney By David Hockney. The second is a book that has lived on my list of books-to-read for nearly four years, but it was also made as a BBC television special in 1992, which I found and watched proceeding A Bigger Splash. The third document is a book, never a film, and has a long autobiographical text that accompanies Hockney’s visual works dating from his youth up until 1976, when the book was published. The BBC film pleased me to no end, with its obsessive inquiry into photographic techniques, and its dramatic unfolding akin to a detective story. The autobiographical book, however, frustrated me for the urgency of activity it inspired. The line drawings were so perfectly human that I thought to myself, as I sometimes do, ‘I must give up silly pursuits of the camera and put pencil to paper.’ Why is this so often the response I have to great art? Why am I obliged to give up my current pursuits and follow in the footsteps of some other particularly expressive genius?
A - confidence.
B - focus.
Let me now, for a moment, stall the seemingly necessary examination of a profound pain caused by my lack of A + B, and instead look back on the method of discovery that brought me to such compelling artwork : the golden thread that led me to Hockney. As I mentioned, Secret Knowledge existed for me on a to-do list. David Hockney by David Hockney existed for me as a vintage book, a beautiful stack of pages clothbound in green, which has been living on my bookshelf for as long as I can remember even if I didn’t pay it much attention. These cultural artifacts had traveled with me for years in the various channels of storage that make up my world : the material architecture of a bookshelf and the digital data of megabytes. My partner has been feeling ill since our roommate tested positive for coronavirus. The realities of a global pandemic shape my social interactions, and they shape my physical circumstances too. Especially now, I have been grateful for my health. I am trying to indulge myself in fruitful indolence, seeking the sweet spot between contradictions. This has meant reading, meditating, taking baths, and going on walks. Also, of course, there is much screen watching. Finding the right movie to watch is of preliminary importance and overwhelming difficulty, it is the decision that determines the balance of my future ‘s fruitfulness and the idleness.
To digress further down this rabbit hole, I am reminded that foraging for mushrooms is an apt metaphor for the passive discovery of treasure. Don’t they say you can’t go looking for love, it has to find you? My dad keeps this quote in his wallet, “seeking happiness is like trying to get a butterfly to land on your shoulder, if you ignore the pursuit and go about your business then one may just come and rest on you for a moment.” I’ve butchered the quote somehow, surely, but in doing so I am reminded of a young Opal Whitely in the most magical photograph. The one in which nearly a dozen butterflies float about her : landing on her hands, clung to her hair, resting on her shoulders.
Enough, okay, I will try to dig myself out of this hole in the snow, back to the other night, quarantining. I was trying to find a movie that could appeal to my dulled senses through drama and action, but also appeal to my intellect by staking its claim within the ongoing research that fuels my artwork. As I made my way through writeups on the various films screening on the platform, I found myself excited about a 1980 film by Bill Gunn, Personal Problems. The trailer was especially effective, it promised a lo-fi authenticity with heart wrenching piano ballad accompaniment; but the piano player’s voice reminded me of works by another genius Arthur Jafa. I decided not to settle there but instead go to see if Arthur Jafa had any film recommendations. Sure enough, it was easy to find him sharing good films he had watched and was thinking about, and that is where I found A Bigger Splash.
I’m loving this, this winding and mysterious way that art finds me and I find it. Part of me wonders if I wouldn’t be plenty satisfied just seeing, hearing, and reading great works of art. No making required. The art of consumption. The art of maintaining an active mind. But, too much mind? That worries me actually. I think that I must use my hands to create: in the flesh, on the page, etc…
Well, a good solution to the common dilemma of what to do and how to think is quite often to simply do something, and then find out what you think.
I’ve made this drawing just now, in my best ( current best, not always best - mind you ) Ode to Hockney. In A Bigger Splash, Hockney uses the camera to document his model for later reproduction in paint on the picture plane. I was just now drawing what lay before my eyes, and couldn’t help looking out onto that tree in the yard and remembering the silly photograph that I made yesterday. Yesterday’s photograph began as an image in my head - a mental sketch, inspired in me by a book called Running Falling Flying Floating Crawling. Those descriptive words activate the human body and describe a multitude of motivations, but while I drew on a piece of paper they coalesced for me and I thought of nothing more than of diving into it. Out the window, into the cold air, onto the snow; wherever I can favor my body to feel something, wherever I can engage the objective world and what it has to offer. In that moment I was thinking those thoughts and I was actually just sitting down drawing on a piece of paper. I looked out onto the snow and projected an image of myself, immersing myself in the landscape, I willed myself to hang from a tree wearing tighty-whiteys. I ran to it, every stride a new barefooted emergence in snow up past my shins. I actually placed the tripod, set the timer, pushed the button, and climbed up into the tree. The camera took a picture while I hung from my arms, inactive for the duration of exposure.
I don’t’ know where this leaves me. I’m before a piece fo paper thinking about David Hockney, about Portrait of an Artist (pool with two figures) 1972. I’m thinking about the fully clothed figure whose gaze ventures beneath the surface of a pool to another figure. The other figure is swimming, fully submerged in the water, wearing tighty-whiteys.