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Lot Essay
Included in David Hockney’s major exhibition A Bigger Picture at the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 2012, Rudston to Sledmere, August is a radiant work from the artist’s first wave of East Yorkshire landscape paintings. Painted in the summer of 2005, the year after he returned to the county, it captures the joy of homecoming, its surface alive with colour, light and intimately-observed detail. During this period, Hockney dedicated himself to painting outdoors, working quickly and intuitively across the seasons. The resulting canvases were expressive, heartfelt love letters to his homeland, alive with the lessons learnt under decades of California’s bright sun. Hockney’s biographer Marco Livingstone described them as ‘the most commanding he has ever made’ (M. Livingstone, ‘Home to Bridlington: Routes to a Private Paradise’, in David Hockney: Just Nature, exh. cat. Kunsthalle Würth, Schwäbisch Hall 2009, p. 188). Here, saturated with the teachings of art history, Hockney’s golden fields, winding track and wild hedgerows sing with newfound inspiration.
Hockney had long painted landscapes: from the back gardens of Los Angeles, studded with sparkling swimming pools, to the dramatic scenery of the Hollywood Hills. He had painted the Grand Canyon, and had spent many hours attempting to capture the undulating beauty of the Pacific Coast Highway. It was not until the 1990s, however, that the fields and skies of his native Yorkshire began to call to him once more. During this decade, he made repeated visits back home, prompted in part by his mother’s illness. His friend Jonathan Silver was also battling the final stages of cancer, and had implored Hockney to ‘go and paint Yorkshire’. Silver’s death in 1997, followed closely by that of his mother, fuelled his commitment to the cause. Major works from this period, including The Road Across the Wolds (1997), Double East Yorkshire (1998) and Garrowby Hill (1998, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) sowed the seeds for a new engagement with landscape painting. Over the next few years Hockney chased spectacular vistas across Norway, Iceland, Spain and Italy, before ultimately returning to the land where his roots ran deep.
Though Hockney had grown up in the city of Bradford in West Yorkshire, he had fond memories of childhood summers working on farms in East Riding. Upon his return in 2004, recollections of those halcyon days came flooding back to him. ‘I was painting the land’, he enthused, ‘land that I myself had worked. I had dwelt in those fields’ (D. Hockney, quoted in L. Weschler, True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversation with David Hockney, Berkeley 2008, p. 199). Following an initial series of watercolours, he began to work on canvas, embracing the challenge of capturing his subjects en plein air and relishing the intimate knowledge it yielded. Hockney came to know how the light changed across the day. He looked more closely than ever before at the textures of bark, grass and earth, delighting in their variance. He recalls pulling over on drives through the countryside ‘so that I could sketch a particular stalk of grass of weed in the low roadside hedge … Each one is quite distinct, quite different … you start seeing everywhere, order emerging out of chaos’ (D. Hockney, quoted at https://www.thedavidhockneyfoundation.org/chronology/2004).
The fruits of these observations are evident in Rudston to Sledmere, August. On the right hand side of the canvas, Hockney’s hedgerow is rendered with extraordinary detail, exquisite patterns of light and shadow filtering through its unruly tangle of branches, flowers and leaves. The artist owed much of this new sensibility to his burgeoning interests in Constable, who had also devoted himself to capturing the untamed beauty of a quiet stretch of English countryside. Van Gogh and Monet, similarly—two of Hockney’s greatest long-standing influences—had returned to the same locations with cyclical obsession, immersing themselves in nature’s subtle nuances. ‘[Van Gogh] said that had lost the faith of his fathers, but somehow found another in the infinity of nature’, he explained. ‘It’s endless. You see more and more’ (D. Hockney, quoted in M. Gayford, A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney, London 2011, p. 32). Over the years Hockney would perform these acts of observation through ever-more complex lenses: from film to his iPad and iPhone. In Rudston to Sledmere, August, however, the series takes flight in the quiet concentration of paint and canvas, its sun-baked path meandering slowly home.
Hockney had long painted landscapes: from the back gardens of Los Angeles, studded with sparkling swimming pools, to the dramatic scenery of the Hollywood Hills. He had painted the Grand Canyon, and had spent many hours attempting to capture the undulating beauty of the Pacific Coast Highway. It was not until the 1990s, however, that the fields and skies of his native Yorkshire began to call to him once more. During this decade, he made repeated visits back home, prompted in part by his mother’s illness. His friend Jonathan Silver was also battling the final stages of cancer, and had implored Hockney to ‘go and paint Yorkshire’. Silver’s death in 1997, followed closely by that of his mother, fuelled his commitment to the cause. Major works from this period, including The Road Across the Wolds (1997), Double East Yorkshire (1998) and Garrowby Hill (1998, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) sowed the seeds for a new engagement with landscape painting. Over the next few years Hockney chased spectacular vistas across Norway, Iceland, Spain and Italy, before ultimately returning to the land where his roots ran deep.
Though Hockney had grown up in the city of Bradford in West Yorkshire, he had fond memories of childhood summers working on farms in East Riding. Upon his return in 2004, recollections of those halcyon days came flooding back to him. ‘I was painting the land’, he enthused, ‘land that I myself had worked. I had dwelt in those fields’ (D. Hockney, quoted in L. Weschler, True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversation with David Hockney, Berkeley 2008, p. 199). Following an initial series of watercolours, he began to work on canvas, embracing the challenge of capturing his subjects en plein air and relishing the intimate knowledge it yielded. Hockney came to know how the light changed across the day. He looked more closely than ever before at the textures of bark, grass and earth, delighting in their variance. He recalls pulling over on drives through the countryside ‘so that I could sketch a particular stalk of grass of weed in the low roadside hedge … Each one is quite distinct, quite different … you start seeing everywhere, order emerging out of chaos’ (D. Hockney, quoted at https://www.thedavidhockneyfoundation.org/chronology/2004).
The fruits of these observations are evident in Rudston to Sledmere, August. On the right hand side of the canvas, Hockney’s hedgerow is rendered with extraordinary detail, exquisite patterns of light and shadow filtering through its unruly tangle of branches, flowers and leaves. The artist owed much of this new sensibility to his burgeoning interests in Constable, who had also devoted himself to capturing the untamed beauty of a quiet stretch of English countryside. Van Gogh and Monet, similarly—two of Hockney’s greatest long-standing influences—had returned to the same locations with cyclical obsession, immersing themselves in nature’s subtle nuances. ‘[Van Gogh] said that had lost the faith of his fathers, but somehow found another in the infinity of nature’, he explained. ‘It’s endless. You see more and more’ (D. Hockney, quoted in M. Gayford, A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney, London 2011, p. 32). Over the years Hockney would perform these acts of observation through ever-more complex lenses: from film to his iPad and iPhone. In Rudston to Sledmere, August, however, the series takes flight in the quiet concentration of paint and canvas, its sun-baked path meandering slowly home.