Immerse yourself in 60 years of Hockney
David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away) at Aviva Studios | Books to add to your New Year's to-read list | Latest NW arts news
I first encountered David Hockney’s work at university - not in a lecture hall or textbook - but at the Centre Pompidou during a year I spent as a language assistant in France. The first part of it was a lonely seven months of living in a tiny town with only 2,000 residents, a handful of streets and a bus timetable that didn’t allow enough time between the one that left and the one that returned to spend more than 90 minutes in the nearby, larger town.
But the job came with a 12-month pass that gave me free entry to any gallery or museum in the whole of France. I spent the summer working in a minimum wage call centre in Paris, living off pasta and tinned tomatoes. I was barely able to pay the rent on my shared flat in the rundown but wonderfully diverse 20th arrondisement, but I could go to any exhibition I chose. So, knowing little about art except the fact that I was drawn to it, I explored.
One of my friends was a bit Hockney obsessed and that’s how I ended up in the Pompidou, absorbed by his enormous painting of the Grand Canyon and his photo collage of Pearblossom Highway, listening to a video of him complaining about the smoking ban in Los Angeles. Visiting Aviva Studio’s David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away) transported me back to that moment of discovery - and to seeing many of his exhibitions since - and reminded me of how significant his work has been to my life. There’s more on Bigger & Closer in the main piece below, and here’s the poster from the Pompidou exhibition, which I should have bought at the time because it’s now worth a fortune.
As this is the first Stored Honey of the New Year, the format is slightly different. This week, I’ve included suggestions of books you might want to add to your to-read list for 2025 if you’re the sort of person to have one. And as a New Year’s treat, I have turned the paywall off archived editions so, should it take your fancy, you can look back and reminisce about all the incredible cultural things that took place in our region during 2024.
And, as always, if you make it to the bottom of this newsletter, you will be rewarded with a postscript link to something that I’ve found interesting or fun this week.
‘The thing about Van Gogh and Monet is they're dead and I'm alive’
Given the number of ‘immersive’ presentations of celebrity artists’ work that have been knocking around over the past decade-or-so, you could be forgiven for being sceptical about yet another one.
But there are two important reasons why David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away) is not an off-the-peg experience where the famous name sometimes seems more important to the producers than the actual art itself.
The first, in Hockney’s own words to the show’s producer Lightroom: “The thing about Van Gogh and Monet is they're dead and I'm alive.” Still creating work at 87 - and continuing to try new things and ask new questions - he is very much alive. This isn’t a show where we have to guess what the artist would have made of it if he were able to travel forward in time - the artist helped to create it.
The second is that had immersive art experiences not already existed you can imagine Hockney would have invented them. This presentation of his work is a natural progression from his experimentation with technology in his art, which began with using an expanding collage of Polaroid shots to free himself from the limits imposed by the edge of a canvas or sheet of paper, and continued by strapping multiple video cameras to a car to film different viewpoints of the same drive. And of course there are his iPad paintings.
Spanning 60 years of his work, Bigger & Closer is part trip into an artistic wonderland, part masterclass. Projected on walls surrounding the audience, who can sit on stepped seating or on benches in the middle of the single space, the works are enlarged so you can see every detail.
Each piece is given a different treatment. Set designs Hockney created for operas in the 1970s and 80s - created because “When I go to an opera I want to have something to look at” - are brought to life by animation. His design for the stained glass The Queen's Window in Westminster Abbey is allowed to stand still for a moment of admiration and reflection, while Nico Muhly’s score soars.
Like other immersive shows, we see his paintings built up, brushstroke by brushstroke before our eyes. But unlike other shows, where the original order has to be guessed at, these are Hockney’s actual marks in the order and pattern he chose to place them recorded by the app on his iPad he used to create them.
In many cases, Hockney gives insights into the works we are seeing - in a disembodied voice sometimes young and confident, sometimes old and somehow more Northern. His preoccupations with themes such as perspective connects his works across the decades, starting with the “enormous possibilities” that his first Polaroid collages offered because he didn’t know where the edge of the work would end up when he began it.
“I thought it was three times better than I had imagined,” he says of Los Angeles, a city that he saw as a place of straight lines until he got into the valleys and everything transformed into curves. As his audio-visual work Wagner Drive plays, he shares how he stumbled upon the idea of recording the drive into the hills accompanied by an operatic soundtrack when he was playing Wagner in his open-top car and realised it fitted the landscape.
It’s a treat to feel like you are eavesdropping on Hockney’s thoughts, which challenge the way we think we view the world, and this way of presenting his rich body of work is genuinely entrancing.
David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away) is at Aviva Studios, Manchester, until Saturday, January 25.
Have you seen it yet? I’d love to hear what you thought of it.
Something to read
I’ve gone through the list of books I read in 2024, some of them new, some not, and here are the ones by North West authors. Because I don’t think we should be parochial when it comes to reading, I’ll share a few non-local favourites at the end.
The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley: Two teenage brothers on a retreat to a Catholic shrine on a wild stretch of the Lancashire coastline are confronted by an ancient dark power found in the landscape.
Revolutionary Spirit by Paul Simpson: The Wild Swans’ frontman’s brilliantly funny, sometimes chaotic memoir will make you want to travel back in time to 80s Liverpool.
Night Side of the River by Jeanette Winterson: With the current rise and rise of AI, this is the perfect time for a book of spooky stories, where the ghost is often the one in the machine.
Wild Twin by Jeff Young: As well as collecting together Young’s memories of his teenage adventures in Europe, this is a reflection on memory itself. I loved chatting to Jeff recently for this piece in Northern Soul.
Imagine Living by Deborah Morgan: Sixteen-year-old Robyn finds herself homeless in 1980s Liverpool after her Nan dies. Alone, she befriends some dangerous characters and must find a way to escape them.
Where There’s Brass by Tom Kitching: I’m in the middle of reading the result of Kitching’s six months living in the London waterways community, having seen his Where There’s Brass show at the Philharmonic Music Rooms. You can find both the book and the accompanying album (he’s an excellent fiddle player) at the link above - and further tour dates here.
Other favourites from this year: Woolgathering by Patti Smith, The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy by Penelope Lively, Cacophony of Bone by Kerri ní Dochartaigh, A flat Place by Noreen Masud, Summer Fishing in Lapland by Juhani Karila, Endless Night by Agatha Christie, Landlines by Raynor Winn.
In case you missed it
Most read Stored Honey editions of 2024
'I really hate the word erased': Another View: Landscapes by Women Artists at the Lady Lever Art Gallery, April 19
Homecoming for much-loved theatre director: Graeme Phillips on his return to The Unity with Krapp's Last Tape, May 10
Nothing old under the sun: Steph Huang at esea Contemporary , September 29
Behind-the-scenes at a busy artists' studio: Meet Liverpool-based painter Josie Jenkins, March 8
Giant sunflowers and whirling stars make Beyond Van Gogh an experience to remember: The immersive experience Beyond Van Gogh gets its much-anticipated UK premier at Exhibition Centre Liverpool, June 29
Thank you for reading the 111th edition of Stored Honey. If you enjoyed what you read then please hit the ❤️ button as it helps to get it shown more widely.
I’m off now to circle places I want to visit this year in a British folklore map I received for Christmas. In the meantime, you can get hold of me on Instagram, on Bluesky, in the comments or by replying to this email.
Happy New Year,
Laura
P.S. Can animals make ‘art’? These examples from nature suggest so
Some book links in this newsletter are affiliates connected to Stored Honey’s bookshop.org page. Should you decide to buy them, the small commission will go towards Stored Honey’s running costs at no additional cost to yourself.