VAN GOGH AND HOCKNEY -- A TWOFER

Brooding Vincent van Gogh. Sunny David Hockney. Two artists who could not be more different. Two artists separated by temperament and time, by style and technology. Yet both are united by their belief in the power of drawing.

For van Gogh, drawing was "the root of everything," New York Times reporter Carol Vogel writes today, quoting him in the lede of her story about an upcoming exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. (The exhibition, which opens next Tuesday, includes 113 van Gogh drawings, among them a pen-and-ink drawing of a Saintes-Maries street, partial detail right, along with a painting he made from it and a pen-and-ink drawing he made of the painting.)

For David Hockney, "who believes that art must find its roots in drawing again," a 1999 MSNBC.com report by Yours Truly noted in the lede, "drawing-by-other-means -- digital imaging via computer, for example -- has already begun that rediscovery."

In a lecture at the time, Hockney said:

What's interesting today is what is happening to photography now that the computer has come along. Actually, the hand is coming back into the camera. What is called manipulation of photographs, I call drawing. What’s really happening is that we are beginning to draw through the camera, through the lens.

The whole point is that we have moved into a period where the photograph has lost its veracity. You don’t necessarily have to believe anything that’s happening in a photograph. We did believe it for a certain length of time, or thought we did.

Now there’s no need to believe it at all, meaning that photography is in a sense back with drawing and painting, actually like drawing and painting. Nobody foresaw that happening.

Or as the Getty quotes him about his photocollage, "Pearblossom Hwy., 11 - 18th April 1986, #1," above left, to which he applied Cubist ideas for the imagery: "Most photographers think that the rules of perspective are built into the very nature of photography, that it is not possible to change it at all. For me, it was a long process realizing that this does not have to be the case."