Rachel Furnari

Of the ten recent paintings included in “Looking at Woldgate Woods,” nine are large (72” x 144”) composite landscapes each made up of six smaller canvases. This method, in which the paintings can be assembled and disassembled easily, enabled Hockney to paint an entire picture en plein air. For “Looking at Woldgate Woods,” Hockney chose to paint the same location, the convergence of three paths in the woods, throughout a year, at different times of day and during every season. Cyclical time, therefore, factors heavily in the paintings, dictating the palette, composition and effect. In a picture from November, the ground and shadows are saturated with the brilliant oranges, purples and reds of late-afternoon sun, while a painting from mid-summer is all lush green and stippled leaves. Hockney’s usually direct and immediate brushwork has been reduced to a powerful shorthand in this series and as the year progresses his familiarity with the scene is rendered in ever-simplified, masterly passages of paint. The historical dimension of the project is heightened by the sense that he has absorbed the best of French colorist theory—Signac, Fénéon, Chevreul, Blanc—and adapted Matisse’s decorative arabesque to take on that most English of subjects: the woodsy landscape. Hockney is a painter’s painter and he deftly lives up to the hype with an unequaled sincerity toward his medium and subject.

David Hockney, “Looking at Woldgate Woods,” shows at Arts Club, 201 East Ontario, (312)787-3997, through July 18. (2008-06-03)

Also by Rachel Furnari

Tip of the Week
In "A World Apart Within 15 Minutes," video artist Enas Muthaffar drives through Jewish West Jerusalum asking for directions to Ramallah. Those willing to speak to her provide her with suggestive hand-waves and estimate it will take an hour and a half to reach Ramallah. In truth, it is only a fifteen-minute drive. Muthaffar’s illustration of the gap between mental and physical distance in Israel and Palestine distills the problem presented by "Imaginary Coordinates"
(2008-05-13)

Tip of the Week
Anne Wilson’s success is the meticulous and elegant execution of her complicated conceptual project. The term "theoretical architecture" seems to be used in reference to sculpture pretty gratuitously these days, but Wilson makes it mean something through the visual specificity and internal coherence of her varied body of work
(2008-02-12)

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