60's Pop Artists; Hockney

David Hockney (born 1937) is a Brittish born Pop Artist out of L.A. He's pretty famous for scened with bright, optimistic colors of suburban scenes like "A bigger splash" of a backyard pool. He's got a pretty flat, clean style that may make some of his paintings seem a little flat. Some students are put off by the fact that he's openly gay. To my knowledge he hasn't painted anything erotic, but there does seem to be a relational "charge" or tension between the male figures in many of his paintings. I for one prefer his photo collages- I think that they're pretty much the inspiration for some of the TV comercials that you see today. My personal favorite is the one of the Pearblossom Highway in the Californa central desert. When I lived in L.A. we liked to drive out to the towns of Palmdale and Lancaster, a few times we took that highway to get to Phoenix to visit my family.

Here's some information about him from Wikipedia (click on his name at the begining of this paragraph to link to their whole entry on him):

In the summer of 1964, Hockney was invited to teach at the University of Iowa, where he was able to complete four paintings in six weeks. In 1965 he was teaching at the University of Colorado at Boulder where he lived in an apartment without windows and painted the Rocky Mountains from memory.

In the 1980s, Hockney turned to photo collage. Using a Polaroid camera, Hockney would assemble collages of photos taken as quickly as possible. Hockney was fascinated with the idea of seeing things through a window frame.

In the 2001 television programme and book, Secret Knowledge, Hockney posited that the Old Masters used camera obscura techniques, which allowed the subject to be projected onto the surface of the canvas, leaving the task of the painter to simply match and fill in the colors. Hockney argues that this technique migrated gradually to Italy and most of Europe, and is the reason for the photographic style of painting we see in the Renaissance and other periods of art. In collaboration with Hockney, Charles Falco, a physicist at the University of Arizona, used optical calculations to show that several errors made in paintings by several Renaissance artists agreed with what they would have painted had they been using a concave mirror to help trace some parts of the paintings, thus leading to what is now known as the Hockney-Falco thesis.