My reflection on David Hockney as an artist.

I find David Hockney to be very inspiring as an artist as his work is so diverse. I found his book 'Portraits and People' very useful both last year on my access course and this year on my degree course, as the theme for our collaborative project was based around portraits both of everyday people and celebrities. I have been researching artists like David hockney who has worked extensively in photography for years, to find out why he is so commited to painting portraits when he could just take a picture. Hockney say's 'he has fallen out of love with the medium, because of its digital manipulation' and now belives 'it is a dying art form'. He says' the impact of computerised images has made it so nothing is authentic anymore, making it hard to believe any image we see as being true to life.' Hockney hopes that when enough people realise that the camera does lie through various degrees of manipulation, this will prove to be a positive side effect for painting.
David Hockney produced a video about the use of optics in the works of old masters which he called 'Secret Knowledge'. It is his belief that optical aids were used by the early masters to create their portrait paintings. We used this information to create our own camera lucidas for our drawing enquiry project at the beginning of the year. This was something I really enjoyed doing, trying to draw an image with a camera lucida was something of a challenge, but I found that the more I did it the easier it became, also the line quality of a lucida drawing is very loose which I found to be good practice for myself as my drawings are usually very tight and precise. At the end of the day even if tools like this were being used by the early masters, they were very raw tools and the perfect portrait still relied on the skills of the artist.