David Hockney @ LA Louver

Intro paragraph here

Watercolor is usually considered a hobbyist's medium. It's easy to picture a weekend painter, wearing a herringbone jacket and khakis, heading out to the country in his car. He might perch his watercolors between the car's front seats, rest his watercolor paper in his lap, look out the window, and paint what he sees.

At least that's how David Hockney, 67, has done it in recent years as he's worked on his latest body of work. The result, a show at L. A. Louver gallery titled, "Hand Eye Heart," is Hockney's first American exhibit of new paintings since 2000. The artwork is personal and wonderful, beautiful and sad.

Hockney is a British artist who has spent most of the last few decades making art about the light, landscape, and men of the American West. Hockney's interest in art history has been a constant throughout his work – his colors, his line and his pictorial space come from Matisse, the neo-cubism of his photo collages come from Picasso. Hockney's new watercolors incorporate his love of art history with his own recent biography.

The last four years of Hockney's life have been turbulent. In 2001 he published a much-discussed book, "Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters," in which he theorized that painters had long used optical assistance devices as a guide. After completing the book – and many, many post-publication defenses of his theory – Hockney was hungry to get back to painting.

Just before the book's publication, Hockney found that life events, including the illnesses of a close friend and Hockney's own mother, caused him to travel frequently back to Yorkshire, where he was born. (His mother has since died.)

Then just after the book came out, events conspired to drive Hockney out of Los Angeles. One of his closest friends died, as did Hockney's beloved dachshund. Finally, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security refused to let a close British friend of Hockney's re-enter the U.S. to visit him. Hockney felt frustrated with life in the United States and he decided to return to England.

Looking for a new challenge, Hockney took up watercolors, a medium he had never seriously explored. Hockney quickly became interested in painting the Yorkshire landscape, but felt that it had been done. (For centuries painters such as J.M.W. Turner have combed over the hills of West Yorkshire.) Hockney wasn't sure he had anything to add to their efforts, but eventually realized that painters had mostly ignored East Yorkshire. Driven by a friend, and with bottles of pre-made watercolors in his pockets, Hockney headed out into the countryside.

The best paintings in the show feature stark, leafless trees perched on gentle hills, and the landscape beyond. Trees are a common art historical metaphor for life -- trees grow at a rate similar to humans and often have similar life spans – and Hockney almost certainly saw himself in them.

"The East Yorkshire, 24 III 04" is one of the clearest metaphorical examples and one of the finest paintings in the show. A sturdy tree, painted in dark watercolors, takes up nearly half of the surface area of the paper. The tree is surrounded by fields, in mostly grays and steel blues, that fall away from it. Above and behind the branches, the sky is mostly cloudy. The tree leans to the left, over a road. The tree's lean directs the viewer to a patch of clear azure sky, the only blue sky in the painting.

Several years before Hockney made this painting, he scattered his mother's ashes over the fields of East Yorkshire. With this painting Hockney seems to be telling us that he may have lost people close to him, but he's still here, older but sturdy, and that he sees some bright spots through the tumult.

These paintings are also full of puddles and water, which provides Hockney the opportunity to paint reflections – often of trees -- in these puddles. This is no accident of the British winter. Here again, art history is Hockney's guide. Throughout Matisse's life he inserted mirrors into his paintings as a way of putting himself into his paintings. Hockney is also familiar with the use of mirrors and reflection in art from his work on "Secret Knowledge," too.

As mirrors do not naturally occur in the East Yorkshire landscape, Hockney makes do with puddles. "Traffic Light and Rain, Bridlington III" is particularly straightforward. Rain is falling, forming ringlets on the ground. The traffic light of the painting's title is terrifically substantial, a monumental black rectangle with a red light, both perched on a blue pole. The light and pole are reflected in the surrounding rain water. The pole is solid, but the body of the light is wavy, distorted, even shaky. I see Hockney himself as the subject of the painting. The leaflessness of his trees serve as a reminder that Hockney is no longer in the summer of his life, and the wobbliness of the reflected traffic light does too.

Watercolor is an intensely personal medium. It is deeply human. Every movement of the painter's brush, including mistakes, is revealed in a line of color. Because watercolor is a popular weekend painter's medium, many of us know a watercolorist. We feel like we have a personal connection to the medium. In this series of paintings, we feel like we know David Hockney, too.