Big Landscape (Medium)

In discussing his work, David Hockney says: " At the same time I also made Big Landscape (Medium Size). The painting is made with two canvases; it began as one and then I made it bigger. I could see I was beginning here to play with spatial ideas. I worked on it off and on for a few months. I kept it in a corner and it looked a bit odd because it is a painting in which I am exploring ideas. Nathan Kolodner from André Emmerich's came and asked me for a painting to put in an auction for AIDS and he wanted this one, which he liked, and I said, Well, it's just developing into something, that's all. I said, I am not sure if you put it in anyone would know I had done it unless they had seen it sitting around my studio. Now, of course, looking back, I can see that this particular painting led to more new developments in my work than the others from this period. Perhaps I sensed that at the time. I had put a lot of things in it, rather like notes of what I was going to explore, and perhaps it is a little bit overdone, but in some ways it is similar to Showing Maurice the Sugar Lift (1974) in that it has various elements of ideas that were beginning to emerge. I was done for myself. You might say that something from Tristan has come into it too, a certain theatricality of space, its preoccupation with space, with sculptural forms on a craggy space which have the illusion of near and far. And it is a landscape too; there is a hint of the sea, although it wasn't painted by the sea, but in the studio in the hills. There is another element, like a railing, in the middle left-hand side of the picture, which becomes particularly prominent in the paintings done four years later and which is a device for making space (D. Hockney, quoted in D. Hockney, That's the way I see it, London 1993, pp. 182 and 186).