True to Life by Lawrence Weschler

Author:Lawrence Weschler [Weschler, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Artists - England, Artists, England, Interviews, Hockney; David, Art, General, European, History, Modern (Late 19th Century to 1945), Individual Artists, American, Biography & Autobiography, Artists; Architects; Photographers
ISBN: 9780520243750
Google: rpTrAAAAMAAJ
Amazon: 0520258797
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2008-03-14T18:30:00+00:00

FIG 38 David Hockney drawing with a camera lucida, 1999.

At length, we took a break, and Hockney reinserted his earpiece. The gist of the image was already well in hand. “Especially the mouth,” Hockney said, tapping the page. “It’s always the hardest to get right when you’re just eyeballing it. Wasn’t it Sargent who said, ‘A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth’? And a smile is hardest of all: it’s not just the mouth but, rather, the precise fleeting relation of the mouth and the eyes, the crinkles around the eyes. I used to struggle for hours—days!—to get a proper likeness, revising and revising so as to transcend the drawing’s inherent awkwardness, and, even so, if you look back, say, at those meticulously realistic drawings of mine from the early seventies, you’ll notice how the sitters are hardly ever smiling: they’re stiff, poised, still—posed.”

He reached once more for the Ingres catalogue. “Whereas here, look,” he said, turning the page. “And this one here, see: absolutely no awkwardness. Not always; not every time. In some of the studies, especially early ones, he’s laid in a traditional grid, and you can see his hand groping. But then you get another of those amazing pencil portraits he was doing in Rome, as a kind of sideline—visiting English gentry on their grand tours, people he was often meeting for the first time. He just dashes the images off, usually in a single sitting, with complete authority.”

Hockney rifled among some of the other books and images spread about his table. “The thing is, once I started seeing it in Ingres, I began to notice lens- or mirror-based imagery, optically rendered imagery in all sorts of other places, including before Ingres, and in fact well before. Hundreds of years before.

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