Stale and Hockneyed?

For the past month, during discussions at my art classes, the name of one artist has cropped up over and over again. That artist is David Hockney. Now a grand old man of British art, his recent exhibition, A Bigger Picture at the Royal Academy, attracted half a million visitors, making it one of the Academy's most popular shows to date.

When Hockney set up his studio in his mum's old house in Bridlington and began painting watercolours of East Yorkshire, a number of people, including me, were dubious. Hockney's candy colours and decorative textures seemed more at home in California than the dour North of England. Covering Provence in violet and yellow, as Van Gogh did, seemed to make sense, but when was Yorkshire ever emerald green and pink? Does Hockney really have something to say about landscape or has he merely turned the RA into a stage set for a camp version of Babes In The Woods?

Hockney is a prolific painter and clearly has the stamina of an artist half his age. Most of the work on display at the Royal Academy was created over the past three or four years and some of the canvases are enormous. In his own words, the pictures are very "new and fresh as well"  and to his credit, he has got people thinking about landscape all over again.

But what about those inappropriate colours? it seems that Hockney has successfully done the same trick with the countryside that Turner did with those gamboge sunsets of his and re-defined it for the rest of us through his own vision. Visitors to the exhibition tell me that, now, when they look at the English countryside, they see Hockney's colours. They're finding his candied orange and parma violet in the country lanes and copses in the South as well as the North. They were hiding in the hedgerows all along and we just needed someone with Hockney's visual acuity to point them out for us.