Saltaire - David Hockney

It felt like December today! It's the first time this year we've seen snow. We needed to do something with the kids, so off we set to Saltaire, thought we'd have a look at the David Hockney gallery. The kids did well and walked around the exhibits, talking and engaging with what they were looking at.

I like the paintings from around 1997 and 1998 they include - Saltaire Painting (1997) - The Road To York through Sledmere (1997) - Yorkshire landscape (1997) and - Garrowby Hill (1998). It's the bright colours, consistency of line widths and balance that draws my eye! It's also kind of weird looking at the Garrowby and Sledmere paintings, I've blasted up these roads on my motorbike many times, so there is a connection to these paintings with a strong emotional context. (Riding a bike is not like driving a car!)

Look - Don't Touch.

The kids liked some of the photo collages, this sort of thing can be done much easier now a days, but when they were originally done it was quite a new idea. Photosynth on the iPhone is a great tool for doing this kind of thing.

This brings me onto 'The Twenty-Five Big Trees Between Bridlington School and Morrison’s Supermarket on Bessingby Road, in the Semi-Egyptian Style - 2010' (quite a name!!) photographs that were on display, a collage on quite a big scale. There are 3 separate photo collages of the same stand of trees, one represents Autumn, the next Winter and the final one Summer (What happened to spring?)

When standing well back from the images everything looks normal, up close the joins in the photographs become more visible, it's a really clever effect and unless you look closely you'd miss the fragmentation altogether.

There isn't much balance between the seasons, Winter and Autumn scenes both have bare trees with no or very few leafs, snow makes the winter scene different. Summer also appears on what looks like a late summer day. On two of the three pictures there is quite basic mask over the bottom of the photos, probably hiding something or maybe the photos don't extend to the bottom! So I'm not sure what I should think about it....

I did enjoy the iPhone pictures, you can see the development from naive through to accomplished pictures, it just shows what can be done when you've a top notch artist.

My All time favourite is A Walk around the Hotel Coutyard, Acatlan - 1985. I remember coming to Saltaire back in the early 1990's and seeing several different workings of this. There was what I remember a big version at one end of the gallery. It felt like you were sat in the shade looking out into the sunlit courtyard. Sadly there isn't any of this on display at Saltaire at the moment.

After we'd been around everything we headed to the Victoria Hall ,for a look around the crafts fair, lots of interesting bits and pieces.

Titus Salt was quite a guy when you look around, we live in Queensbury and Fosters spent a fortune in our village, but Salts legacy is even more impressive.