20 Flowers For 2025

There's a new Hockney exhibition just opened in Salts Mill. '20 Flowers For 2025 And Some Bigger Pictures' is a contribution of Bradford-born artist David Hockney, and Salts Mill, towards Bradford's City of Culture 2025. 

As exhibitions go, it's not one of his most amazing. (Little could top the previously displayed 'Arrival of Spring', for me at any rate.) It consists of twenty iPad drawings of flowers, plus a few other paintings made from his home in Normandy. Nevertheless, it's worth seeing - and where else in the world could I just walk into such an exhibition, on my doorstep, completely for free? I feel so fortunate. 

The image I like best is the one (above, with detail below) of Hockney looking at the flower paintings. It's a photograph but, such is Hockney's playful and curious nature, even in his late 80s, that he has shown himself seated twice in the image and the rest of it consists, effectively, of a collage of other photos. 

He says of it: 'This is photographic but it is in no way an ordinary photograph... Ironically, the only things not photographed in this picture are the flowers themselves. The objects on the floor are all photographed in 3D, one walks round the object and then the computer makes an image that can be turned any way you want. This is why I called them photographic drawings. You can place them anywhere in the picture, so I think it's a new kind of photography that avoids perspective. I am continuing with this research.' 

That's why I love this man's mind. From his fairly early photographic 'joiner' pictures to his use of an iPad for painting, he is continually thinking about and playing with concepts of time, space and perspective. Fascinating. 

Even though it was the opening day of the exhibition, there were quite a few visitors to the gallery. 

I enjoyed the broad view and then looking closely at the details of each picture - how he paints glass and how he has found at least twenty different ways to depict a checked tablecloth.