I’ve had this written for a while, i just haven’t gotten around to posting it yet.
It’s thoughts on the David Hockney documentary we watched the week before thanksgiving.
The whole documentary was how David Hockney was trying to solve the mystery of how around the year 1420, everybody could suddenly draw better. Paintings were ridiculously realistic, such as chandelier in Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Wedding, detailed fabrics in various other paintings, and items such as silk and metal armour.
Hockney attributes camera obscura to the accuracy and realism of these paintings, and goes through with building his own camera obscura to recreate some of the paintings. It was interesting to see how some of these artists paintings some of the realistic things in their paintings, like I remember bring in some art galleries, and seeing a painting of a woman, and she is wearing a dress, the silk looks unbelievably real. But for me, this documentary kind of ruined the mystery. I have always marveled at these paintings that are extremely realistic, and now that I know how it was done, it just makes me think of how i would be able to produce the same thing.
I feel that it brought a scientific aspect to art. I know that science plays a big part in visual art and culture, but it seemed as if Hockney was looking at painting as a mathematical formula, as opposed to something that we consider to be free and expressive. I am not denying that these artists used the techniques discussed, because they probably did, but it seemed like Hockney was saying that they did something wrong. The dark atmosphere in which he was working and the use of music, as well as the statement that suddenly ‘ everyone could draw better’ also contributed to the notion that these artists were doing something wrong.
It’s kind of a hard topic, because it is good that we can see how these artists achieved some of their effects, but at the same time, it made me think a bit less of their technique, which is something I didn’t necessarily want to do.
