Image © David Hockney/Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. All Rights Reserved.

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From: David Hockney - A Bigger Picture, UK Book.

20.01.12: painting details

'What it is I'm going to show you is an alleyway of trees ...When I moved up here, I recognised this is really very rare and beautiful.'
David Hockney, speaking to Carol Kane, October 2009

These group of trees actually line Rudston Road near the village of Burton Agnes in East Yorkshire. In recent years they have become one of the artist's most revisited points of beauty. It has already become a crucial part of the Hockney mythology.

This was, importantly, his first multi-canvas painting.

The artist called the group of trees 'The Tunnel' as the tops of the trees serve as a canopy over the road. As the overall picture is 6 x 12 feet the bigness of the effect in real-life is captured in the painting. Smaller, surely, would not have conveyed the bigness of things. Hockney himself put it succinctly:

'To make big statements with paintings, you have to paint them big.'

To achieve such scale, Hockney painted the painting across six seperate canvases. The logistical nightmare of taking one giant canvas to Rudston Road seems to have been the catalyst for the idea of seperate canvases. But then the germ of the idea must have emanated from or, at least, been a partial reference to the multiple use of polaroids the artist was using years back. Whatever, the big effect works because within that bigness the eye is encouraged to wander from one canvas to the next, taking it all in, the varying perspectives of nature.

Rudston Road has had a major influence on his work, a place he, seemingly, can't resist. He has filmed, photographed and painted it.

Surely, as such, it will do more for the East Yorkshire tourist board than anything itself has done in the last 100 years.

For me, on a personal level, I would love to see Hockney spend some considerable time in somewhere like the Faroe Islands or Iceland. Imagine what he could do with those landscapes...

Text: Paul Page, 2012

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20.01.12: a bigger picture book & exhibition

David Hockney - A Bigger Picture, UK Book.
Accompanies the acclaimed 2012 Royal Academy Exhibition. Details: here. Details: exhibition.

Book Available: Amazon.co.uk| Amazon.com (US)

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Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Puchased with funds provided by Geoff and
Vicki Ainsworth, the Florence and William
Crosby Bequest and the Art Gallery of New
South Wales Foundation, 2007
© David Hockney/Collection of Art Gallery of
New South Wales, Sydney
All Rights Reserved.