Artist: David Hockney

David Hockney is an English artist most known for his paintings, but who has also done Polaroid collages. In a cubist style, he shoots from slightly different angles and exposures, and allows information to duplicate in these pieces, due to either his own movement or that of the subject. This method sparked from simply trying to piece together a wide-angle type shot without getting the distortion of a wide-angle lens. Instead of lens distortion, the cubist-type visual of the collage attracted him to the process, and he even dropped painting altogether for a time in order to follow it. This is very similar to the way I got involved in the process, originally trying to simply stitch together a panoramic image, but enjoying the process and the way it showed in the final piece.

Hockney also works a lot with the edges of the various collage pieces, allowing them to form jagged lines and even stretch out away from the main cluster of images. These stylistic choices add a lot of visual and conceptual dimension to his work, something that I'm trying to do this semester. I also noticed one of the display methods used in a gallery, in which the piece was set a couple inches off the gallery wall. Since it wasn't mounted, the jagged edges formed by the individual Polaroids created a very nice shadow on the wall behind the piece. I've created and displayed a collage like this once before back in AFO, and I might look into re-visiting it this semester. It seems as if Hockney was one of the pioneers of this type of photographic work, so I'm very glad that it was recommended that I look into him.http://www.hockneypictures.com/