In 2018, David Hockney's Portrait of an Artist (Pool with 2 Figures) sold at auction for a record $90.3 million dollars. The sale inspired writer and illustrator Simon Elliot to research Hockney's life and to study his art for this graphic novel biography. Up until reading this book, my only experience with the British artist Hockney was a Jeopardy! question involving his series of pop art paintings of ever growing in size splashes in a pool. What can I say, the guy likes water.
Growing up in England during World War II and becoming interested in art during the country's massive reconstruction from the Nazi airstrikes meant that Hockney had to be creative with the materials he could use to express his creativity. Many important items, such as paper, were heavily rationed. As a lad, Hockney had to use the margins of books, scrap materials, even the walls of his house to create his first works. This inspired many of Hockney's earliest professional paintings and etchings to be of mixed mediums.
Over time, Hockney diversified his use of a collage technique in his paintings to spill over into prints, photography, stage and set design and more. Hockney also turned his love of art into a passion for art history, publishing works devoted to his idol Pablo Picasso among others. Openly homosexual in a time when being gay was a criminal offense in England, some of Hockney's art was considered cheeky if not vulgar. Yet the artist's most controversial work might be a theory that postulates that many of the great artists of the 1400-1600s used a lighting device called a camera obscura which essentially allowed those masters of art to capture the still lifes they painted not from visual perspective but copied off from a projected image.
Simon Elliot's book is full of recreations of Hockney's works with other images superimposed to reflect the many influences that inspired the artist's work. His personal life is also captured in depth. But there are so many lovers, partners, family members and associates in this book, some sort of diagram is needed to be able to keep up with them all.
David Hockney is considered by many to be a major player in the pop culture movement. At age 86, he's one of the last living icons of that era. Yet do not think for a minute that Hockney is stuck in the past with his newest works. Since the coming of the 21st century, Hockney has embraced technology, creating massive digital works on his iPad, measuring several hundred meters in length. I think it's safe to argue that without the strides Hockney made in creating digital exhibits that could be viewed simultaneously across the globe, you would not have projects like the Van Gogh Exhibit: The Immersive Experience.
Hockney is as unique a graphic novel as the man himself. This is not a typical graphic novel in which the artist's life is depicted through panels of sequential art. Each page and two-page splashes are collages of a certain period of time in Hockney's life. There's very little dialogue. Mostly it's one or two sentence long quotes added with paragraph long narratives. This book is experimental, edgy and underground just like Hockney. At one point, two pages have the exact same narrative, word for word. I couldn't tell if that was a printing error or an intentional reflection of one of Hockney's early protest pieces.
This work also contains some images and adult situations that do not make this an all ages read. For one interested in learning about art history, especially modern art of the last 65 years, this graphic biography is for students aged in the upper teens or older.
Worth Consuming!
Rating: 8 out of 10 stars.
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