Over the weekend I saw Exhibition on Screen: David Hockney at the Royal Academy of Arts. The film presents two exhibitions, A Bigger Picture (2012) and 82 Portraits and One Still Life (2016).
A Bigger Picture features large-scale paintings inspired by England's East Yorkshire landscape. To prepare for these paintings Hockney drove to the countryside to do some drawings. What surprised me was that he drew on an iPad. Those drawings are also featured in the exhibition.
Why an iPad? The advantage is speed. The screen is smooth, meaning the stylus doesn't encounter the same resistance as a pencil on paper. For a draftsman, Hockney says, speed is everything.
Hockney's relationship with technology is perfectly balanced. He sees technology as neither good nor bad. In gaining something you lose something else. Hockney recounts attending the launch of Photoshop in 1989. After the conference, he felt he encountered the death of film and chemical photography. Photography, from then on, he says, is a craft.
I was struck by this, by the demotion in status the word craft implies. Craft is the term fiction writers, in workshops and in books, use when speaking of the work behind their writing. Sometimes you hear substitutions, words like technique or form. Technique feels somewhat different than craft -- perhaps more experimental -- while form, for the most part, is preferred in academic discussions.
So what I take from Hockney's remark is a feeling for a difference between craft and technique. My feeling is that craft tends toward the tried and true, what has proven generally to work. Technique, then, searches for solutions craft cannot solve.
Discussions hinging on a distinction between old and new, traditional and experimental, conventional and innovative might seem trite. They might seem controversial and divisive. They don't need to be. They are controversial when we assume old is bad and new is good, or vice versa. Seems to me we might want to approach such discussions -- and our art as well -- as does Hockney, who, at 82, is both a master of his craft and a champion of experimentation, who, in the same project, draws on an iPad and paints en plain air.
