What Would Hockney Do
Sylvie Peltier 
How Hockney thinks about depicting reality and how it influences my work.
"There's no reason you should believe in a photograph more than you do in a painting."
- David Hockney
One of the things I've discovered about David Hockney, whom I introduced last month, is that he's obsessed with the depiction of reality. Not only that, he argues that painting is superior to photography to represent the world around us.
How could he say that?
It starts with how we define reality. The fact is that the world around us is filtered by our own perception which is also influenced by our memory and mood. A photograph is only a single picture at a given time. If you took another photo at the exact same time from a different spot, you would get a different picture. Which of these would you say is the best depiction of reality? The "reality" that a photograph shows only applies to that moment in time and space.
If you want to convey reality then, you might want to bring in other elements and other points of view in order to depict the true, "real", nature of what is in front of you. In other words, an artistic interpretation of what you see might be the best path to convey reality after all.
In his quest to capture the world around him David Hockney also disputed the notion of the one-point perspective which has been standard in Western paintings for hundreds of years. He studied Chinese paintings on scrolls and loved how they used multiple points-of-views within one drawing. He also became interested in painting very large, mural-sized, paintings so that people would feel like they were IN the painting, rather than outside looking in.
In 1998 Hockney painted the Grand Canyon on 60 canvases in a 5 x 12 arrangement for a total surface of 81 1/2 x 293 inches. "A Bigger Grand Canyon" at the National Gallery of Australia.
But it inspired me to create a Bigger painting of my own with multiple panels for my January 2026 show at the The Old School House in Qualicum Beach. I'm starting "small" with six 24x30 inch canvases. I'll work from a panoramic photograph and vary the time of day within the painting.
