“Art is the highest thing we do in society. It touches us in ways, consciously or unconsciously,” says art collector Jordan D. Schnitzer, a real estate mogul whose family has been at the forefront of Portland’s business makers for decades. His collection, among the largest in North America, includes 2,000 paintings and sculptures by modern and contemporary masters such as Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeois, Frank Stella, Judy Chicago, Jeffrey Gibson, Alison Saar, and Kara Walker, and thousands of other prints, including 1,400 paintings by Warhol. “Waking up without art around me is like waking up without the sun.”
His collection also includes hundreds of works by David Hockney, many of which toured the country, moving from the Honolulu Museum of Art to the Palm Springs Museum of Art, then the Grand Rapids Museum of Art, before finally arriving at the Honolulu Museum of Art. She makes her way back to the Portland Art Museum In Schnitzer’s hometown, on display through July. Collectively, the show is a Hockney scene, with California swimming pools, Yosemite National Park and French countryside landscapes, as well as portraits of friends and family, book illustrations and theatrical backdrops. These include early lithographs that Hockney made with Ken Tyler, who established the legendary Los Angeles printing house Gemini GEL in the 1960s.
While Hockney was still a student at Bradford College of Art in London, he relied primarily on basic printing techniques such as lithography and etching, which he embraced throughout his life. The oldest piece on display in Portland is a self-portrait (one of at least four) – a 1954 lithograph from his student days. He is depicted here with a dark bowl cut (he dyed his hair blonde when he heard blondes had more fun), tie, jacket and striped trousers, against yellow striped wallpaper.
Eventually, he moved on to watercolor painting, which uses a copper plate etched with nitric acid to achieve a watercolor-like effect. Later techniques include fine ground, an engraving process using a greasy, soft, tacky ground on a copper or zinc plate to achieve smoother lines and harmonious areas. Examples at the Portland Art Museum include a tribute to Picasso, student, which shows the artist’s head on a pole alongside a student with a drawing pad tucked under his arm. Hockney’s sugar-raising prints included etching an image with
By the 1980s, he had embarked on the Home Made Prints series, using a Xerox machine to make color still photographs such as Apples, pears and grapes and Bowl of fruit Or monochrome Black plant on the table From 1986. His Office chair He uses six sheets of Arcs paper (the finest), passed through a Xerox machine to assemble the multi-colored composition. “While he lived in Los Angeles, I was in his studio at least once a month,” says Kimberly Davis of the Louvre Gallery in Los Angeles, which has represented the artist since the 1970s. “All the ideas behind each image are as important as how and why things are developed. He was always working with people and/or places. He was never reticent to use new technology. His father was an inventor and photographer, and his lifelong love of photography shows in many aspects of the work.”
Portraits are a staple of Hockney’s output, including a group of 82 images created for his 2016 show ’82 Portraits and 1 Still Life’ at the Royal Academy of Arts. One of the protesters is Douglas Roberts, who attended the opening in Portland. “I met David shortly after I graduated from UCLA, around 1982,” he recalls. “He was on the kitchen floor on his hands and knees, moving Polaroids he had just taken of people. He was photographing Polaroids and watching them develop and create a mosaic for someone. And we proceeded to talk for two hours about Pablo Picasso.”
Part of the Moving Focus series, Acatlan Hotel: After two weeks, It is a piece from 1985 made when Hockney and some friends were traveling through Mexico. It is an image of a country roadside inn that plays with reverse perspective, a recurring motif frequently found in his work from this point on. “This is a clear example of standing in one place and seeing all around the yard,” Roberts says of the mylar print. “It’s forced perspective, where you’re in the middle of the picture and everything else is outside of you. David could roll up the mylar and take it with him to Mexico. He didn’t have to take the lithos with him; he could layer the mylar and see the other colors. The mylar was then used to make the plate that the print was made from.”
Reverse perspective is the key to his large-scale series of works from 2014-2017 which consist of diverse photographic elements that arouse expectations, sometimes resulting in background elements appearing larger in scale than those in the foreground, as in images such as Chairs (2014), and more clearly in The perspective should be reversed From the same year. The artworks grow in size over the years, peaking in 2019 In the studioanother large-scale photographic drawing by the artist standing amidst several reverse-perspective pieces that measure 32 3/4 inches by 89 3/4 inches.
Before viewers get to that big synopsis, there’s the iPad work — large-scale landscapes of Yosemite and Normandy made in the past 10 years, first on his phone and later on his iPad. “The app he uses to be able to draw started with the iPhone. Then the iPad came along, and it had a bigger surface,” Roberts says, referring to the tight compositions created on the phone, such as Lilies and Early morning,” both from 2009. “He met this kid who created an app called Brushes, so he could draw on the iPad with his finger. This kid has developed a whole set of tools for David.”
Large iPad panels are limited to the size of the printer only. After finding a larger printer, Hockney was able to challenge those limits by printing part of the composition on individual sheets of paper, which, when arranged, formed a mosaic of the larger picture. to August 7, 2021, rain on the pondanother rural landscape painted on an iPad, Hockney used watercolor on raw canvas to paint the pond, a technique he discovered while visiting Japan in the 1960s and which continued throughout his career.
The many prints, paintings, photographs and posters in many styles can be summed up in one word: greed. Hockney said: “I think I’m greedy, but I’m not greedy for money; I think that can be a burden.” “I’m greedy for an exciting life. I want it to be exciting all the time, and I understand that, actually. On the other hand, I can find excitement, I confess, in raindrops falling on a puddle, and not many people will. I intend to make it exciting until the day I fall.”
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