📝 Painting With Photographs
Lessons on creativity from one of Hockney’s masterpieces
‘There’s always another way to do it.’ — David Hockney
I recently visited the Heong Gallery in Cambridge to see one of the halves of the ‘Hockney’s Eye’ exhibition. This picture caught my entire attention and wonder:
‘The Scrabble Game’ was painted in 1983. Described as a photographic collage, the artwork looks indeed like a painting - a picture painted with stills instead of brushstrokes. I found this such a creative way of using the medium of photography.
When I got home, I researched a bit more about this art piece and read some essays from the exhibition’s book (I highly recommend Martin Gayford’s one). These are some lessons on creativity we can pick up from this masterpiece and from Hockney’s creative approach in general:
1
There is always room for innovation. It is always possible to look at established approaches from a different point of view, in a fresh perspective.
Hockney was a very keen photographer in the 80s. He was always trying to push the medium, searching for unconventional ways to use the camera, and exploring different solutions to the old problem of depicting a tridimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. He was questioning how to use the medium of photography to depict time in a closer way to the human experience of reality.
In this work, he transcends the conventional photograph by building a picture that is made of other pictures: moments of observation during the game he is playing. It is a depiction closer to the reality of his experience: eyes moving constantly, looking here or there, paying attention to certain details - the light reflecting on the fringe of the lady, the thoughtful expressions of the old woman on the right, the corner of the table, the hands moving, the cat playing, noticing the corners of the rooms, extending the eye further away…
Try to do the exercise of looking at each photograph separately and then again at the whole. Hockney has painted here a short film in stills, capturing time, motion - and emotion.
2
Your experience of the world matters a great deal when you draw (or design). Celebrate it!
‘The Scrabble Game’ is done from an entirely subjective experience. This is always the case in all creative endeavours, although in this picture Hockney makes it very obvious by placing his hand at the bottom to remind us that each of the stills is an observation from his personal point of view. Another person would have paid attention to different things, and the result would have been an entirely different collage.
3
It’s not the outcome that matters - it’s learning about the rules of the process in order to continuously challenge them.
Martin Gayford points out that ‘his [Hockney’s] complaints against many conventional accounts of the art of the past is that they show little curiosity about the practical nitty-gritty of creating a picture. An artist, Hockney protests, wants to know how things were made - hence the preoccupation with the tools of his trade.’
Learning how to draw (focusing on the process) or how to use a specific creative tool, will be more compelling in the long-term in your creative career than learning to draw a specific object (what to draw, focusing on the outcome). This is our drawing philosophy at The Sketch Club: the way we learn, fundamentally, is by repeating and iterating the process, understanding the rules of the game - so we can break, challenge, and change them to serve our imagination :)
Go back and look at ‘The Scrabble Game’ again, get lost in the details, in time, zoom in and out to see the whole. Pay attention to every still.
Hockney quotes a Chinese proverb, something that summarises very well his practice: ‘three elements are required to paint, the hand, the eye, and the heart. Two won’t do.’ I love this, especially the heart part of it, and I believe this applies to any creative work - loving what you do is as important as skill and craft (if not more…).
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Happy sketching!
Ana
Have you been sketching this week? It would be great to hear about it! Please, leave a comment and share your thoughts down below :)
Wow, I love that picture. It tells a whole story, over time, and conveys so many emotions.