Don't go permanently please Brain - otherwise Neil will have to borrow my crutches to referee! :)
Well, that was a good start to my group. I love passionate people and a good old dingdong but no personal insults please. Enough of naughty man Hirst, any thoughts on how great Mr. hockney is or shall we start on Banksy? Also, how about some of your own art on here.
Here's my small painting of Herringfleet mill on the Norfolk broads in winter.
I am in your court Richard on this. Different ages, different approaches but at least thay are making art, attracting peoples attention even those who don't 'like' art. They, again, don't look closer, just the instant image which is, again a product of our age. But people do keep going to galleries all over the world and just sit and look at the painting on the wall in front of them. The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition gets more popular every year with more submissions.
And talking of submissions, lets het a few more on the wall!
Just occured to me that Hockney's recent work reminds me of artist/illustrator Eric Ravilious - www.ericravilious.co.uk - a lyrical landscape painter of the 1930's and 40's.
Short piece on Hockney on Country file on BBC1 on Sunday. He has employed a team to produce a video of a trip down a lane in Yorkshire. Nine cameras attached to a 4 x 4 giving a 180 degree view. they repeatedly travelled the same route throughout a year. At his forthcoming exhibition, the video will be shown on a grid of 9 large screens. the cameras and the screens are not lined up exactkly so you can see the joins. As the vehicle moves the seasons change-the effect is mesmerising even on a small TV. The leaves appear and dissapear as the light changes, rain falls and snow covers the ground. An interesting observation is that the darkest time of the year is in the summer when the leaf canopy completely and you travel down a green tunnel. This reinforces the view that we don't actually look that hard at our surroundings.
I have plans for a residential course in the early summer here in Mouhous to teach more about looking and observing and getting the images down on paper. Hockney is a brilliant draughtsman and painter whatever medium he uses and still has the ability to extend the boundaries of his art and has a great time doing it as well!
I would call Hirst a plagarist-everything he has done has been a copy. His spinning paintings, the plastic man, the animals and the diamond skull-all other peoples ideas and presented as his own. It's amazing that so many people are willing to pay huge sums of money for his secondhand art.