COMMON COVER DAVID HOCKNEY, A BIGGER PICTURE

摘要

Woldgate Woods, 21, 23 & 29 November 2006, is a large-size picture (182 × 366 cm), painted on six canvases placed side by side. The subject of the picture is a rural landscape, a sparse and orderly expanse of woodland through which runs a road, its form barely recognizable under a blanket of fallen leaves and a trickle of puddles. The scene is characterized by a vivid autumnal light, presumably of the early morning, that casts long and slender shadows of the bare trees and brightens up the warm tones of reddish orange (the leaves on the ground and on the tops of some trees), the green of the wood, the pale blue of the sky. In the foreground the greenish trunk of a tree, painted with free and rapid brushstrokes, is cut off, as if by the frame of a photograph, inviting the viewer to immerse himself in the landscape, whose geometry is shaped entirely by the vegetation. The six canvases, painted contemporaneously en plain air but on which the painter worked one at a time, so that they present slight misalignments and discontinuities in the brushstrokes, creating the impression of an extended and multiple space.