David Hockney's BIG show at the DeYoung

©  This is an undisciplined ramble. I talk about lots of stuff but I am going to leave it up for now cause there are a couple things here that are working me and it will help me work knowing they are up. No one really reads me, maybe a friend once in awhile, but mostly it's just me here. And I can do whatever I want. Yes, Katie K, I can use your name and claim you as my daughter. You said "I allow you to use my name on your blog". You don't let me honey.  You can't stop me from stating facts and it is an irreversible fact that I am your mother.  I could write about very personal, private aspects of your past and as long as I got the facts right, you couldn't stop me.

If anyone is reading this, it's a mess. But it is my copyrighted mess. I'll write a better entry on Hockney. I think the show is set me off kilter. Well, maybe I am always off kilter so more off than usual.


First, I need to clear the air for my own sake. I like post-modern art, contemporary art that is not always pretty to look at, which is about something, makes a statement. SFMOMA did a major retrospective of Anselm Kiefer just as I moved to the Bay Area. I went once a week to see the show the whole time it was open because I could not get enough of Kiefer's thinking, and his vision. He had a few beautiful paintings in the show but there were also several lead airplanes.

The lead airplanes are metaphors but there they are black, lumpy, dead. Lead airplanes do not fly. Many debate whether some of his work is direct commentary on the post-Nazi legacy of Germany. My favorite lead airplane is presented with a print of Alfred Durer's etching from, I think, the fourteenth century called 'Melancolia'. This etching is in the NYC Metropolitan museum. Next time I am at the Metropolitan, I will have to take a long look at the original.  In Melancolia we see a large angel with gigantic white wings, the classic biblical image, at least as presented by artists since artists painted. A larger than a human, human-like body and gigantic, beautiful, white wings. Painting about bible stuff has been a common theme in 'classical art' since forever.  I am sure art museums in Iran or Egypt don't have room after room filled with Christian bible stories pictorially represented but any Western art museum that has a comprehensive collection of Western European art history has lots of bible stories.

In Durer's time, melancholia was believed to be what happened to people who had soaring visions for how wonderful human life on earth could be; then when they see the gap between their visions and the reality that the vision will not be reached, at least in their lifetimes, they fall to earth, like a lead airplane. They become depressed when they realize life is not going to be as wonderful as they know it can be. So far, it is my favorite explanation for depression.

In durer's etching, we see the angel has a broken wing. Broken-winged angels and lead airplanes cannot fly. The Third Reich began with high ideals but it was missing something essential and it could not fly.

That's my kind of art. It gets me thinking big, my being soars.

Pretty stuff to look at is nice. I like seeing artists' take on the world. If artists are different than the rest of us, if they are more sensitive and attuned, and their art is their attempt to show us what they see and feel, I want to look at their work and stretch to try to see what they see and feel.

At the same time, capturing any individual's vision of nature, or of humans, or even bible stories presented in visually brilliant pictures is dull to me.

Hockney's show, in my humble, uninformed opinion is gobsmackingly gorgeous. BIGGER is the name of the show and it is not just because it is one of the biggest shows the DeYoung has ever mounted. There are many very big pieces in the show. And it is not a retrospective of his entire oeuvre.  It is, mostly, fairly recent stuff. I think the oldest piece I saw was 2001 and he's an old man, been working a long, long time.

I went hoping to see the early California Hockney.  I saw a Hockney years ago, when I still lived in the Midwest, and the water in a swimming pool, with a glimpse of the ocean in the distance, is still in my mind's eye. The blue won't leave me. Pretty, penetrating paintings.

And pretty much everything in this DeYoung show is pretty and penetrating. And contemporary. One of the first galleries in the show is a gigantic collection of photographs portraying Spring 2013.

Hockney began using water colors for the first time only very recently. He uses paper, as is traditional for water color. He uses pieces of paper and sometimes needs to use several pieces to capture his whoile image. When I first read that he did water color on paper, I hoped it was wet on wet water color painting. I'd like to see what he does with wet on wet water color. An artist has to develop a highly refined technique to do wet on wet water color painting. With a wet paper canvas, the paint seeps fast. The artist has to be quite expert to control what wet water color does as it moves on wet paper. But he's 'just' painting on dry paper with water color. Interesting. I bet it helped him see the world different, to see pictures emerge from a new medium.

Photography is new to him. Hockney plays with technology. He has several galleries full of art 'painted' on an iPad or else photographed with an iPad.  He also uses digital film, maybe also on an iPad -- I have to go back. I rushed through the show yesterday. It was just so much.  I am fuzzy on the technology tools he is using.

I have heard that artists have begun using technology to create art. And I knew this all along. I remember Nam Jun Paik's early video work. Nam Jun Paik, if I am recalling his name right, was a Vietnamese American who was one of the first artists to use video in his work, to create an image somewhat comparable to a painting with video. Gosh, he was using video in the eighties, maybe the seventies.

Of course creative types, some of them, are going to see technology as new tools and toys for their work. Plus an artist has ongoing dialogues with art, other artists, art history and the whole world. If the world is dialoging nowadays with videos shot on iPads, the artist has to keep up. Some of them.

I also quite love artists who do their thing, like a painter who paints realistic, figurative works her whole career. She never leave oil painting. She never does assemblage. She doesn't try all kinds of things. She paints beautiful paintings her whole career. Like Diebenkorn did. And nothing wrong with that.

There is one gallery in the show that filled me up in an instant. I pretty much ran through the rest of the show because this one gallery was so intensely beautiful, visceral. Mesmerzing, really. It had four large digital photos of exquisitely beautiful shots of nature. A stand of trees is one.  Another shows a  road through a canopy of trees that, on the horizon seem to form a portal to another dimension but it is literally a photo of a real road.  These are not static photos. But they aren't quite video, or movies. It is like Hockney has brought a natural stand of trees into the gallery using the photo-digital-moving technique he uses. These 'pictures' take 20 to 30 minutes to run through the whole picture. It is quite a lot like standing outside, watching tree leaves quiver with the wind and noticing how the sunlight subtly changes one second to the next. At first I thought I was looking at four photos, stills, but then the photos reveal themselves as alive. It is close to looking out a window at a forest, or a meadow. Only you are inside an art gallery.

These moving pictures are very, very beautiful.  A part of me is weeping as I remember the visceral experience of seeing them.

The galleries were very crowded. It was a special preview day for members.  But the gallery was pretty packed. I will go back next week at ten a.m. on Tuesday, often one of the slowest times of the week in a museum. The weekend tourist crowd is gone. I like empty museums.

One of my favorite things about being a docent was being able to look at the art alone once in awhile. As a docent, preparing for my custom tours, I could go into the museum on Mondays, when it was closed. During my training, which only had four docent students, we had the run of the whole museum. The teacher and four students.  It's very different, seeing art in a still setting.

I'm rambling. My thoughts scattered more than usual.

A quite large moving, living photo of moving living nature. Wow. These pieces evoked for me very very late Monet.

One of the most moving experiences I have had as an art viewer was a gigantic, comprehensive Monet show at the art institute of Chicago, my home art museum. My mom tried to take me there at least once a month the whole time I was growing up. I guess that's where I got my love of going to art museums a lot. Mom, thank you. You got a few things right, although only a few. Instilling a love of art in me was an eternal, infinite and precious gift.

Anyway, a gigantic amount of space was given over to the Monet show. And the show was mobbed all day every day. I made several trips to Chicago just to see the show. It was a great show, showing his earliest works, bringing you along as he evolved as a painter. You see him moving towards abstraction. I had always loved  a series of paintings called "Morning on the Seine" which are paintings of the exact same spot at different moments in the early morning. From one moment to the next, the color and light change completely, right? This happens all day long every day. Color and light are always changing. Monet tried to capture, with oil paint and a canvas how the color and light of one spot on the Seine changed, one moment to the next.

In this Monet show, you move through his whole oeuvre, beginning to end. The show was brilliantly curated. And then you come to the final gallery or two where you see massive paintings of water lilies painted in such microscopic detail but kinda blown up so it doesn't, at first, seem like you are looking at anything but color and light. your eyes adjust and you 'see' 'oh, more water lilies, closer up'. you can almost see in the artist's mind.

So in this Monet show, you walk into gigantic galleries and see his final, gigantic paintings on the wall. It was such a penetrating experience. My whole being weeped in joy, in appreciation of the beauty. Why don't I spend my life making images of this world's exquisite beauty? I could, at the least, appreciate the gobsmacking beauty that drenches every moment of my life, even in my apartment when it is a mess and I didn't do the dishes. There's a series of paintings for you:  my messy bedroom, shown with the daylight at different moments on a single morning. At 7:02 show my room and the light exactly how it looks at 7:02. Then show it again at 7:04.

If I were a painter, or any medium of an artist, I would not want to paint my room -- although artists often do paint their bedrooms. I have a poster of Van Gogh's little bedroom and its narrow single bed on my college dorm wall.  Diebekorn did paintings not only of his bedroom but one of a close friend when the friend died.  Artists often do bedrooms, often with no one in them.

I guess artists often paint everything if you put them all together.

If I could paint right now, I would do a series that showed the rounded tower-like end of my apartment building. I live on the top floor. When I awake each morning, the first thing I see is where the light is on that rounded end of the building.  The rooms in that rounded end are curve, with a curved wall of windows. When I first moved here, I coveted one of those rooms but they only are given to two bedroom and three bedroom units. I have a one bedroom.

But I have developed this habit of seeing the round tower across the courtyard outside my bedroom window as a kind of sundial.  I have spent many moments, over five years now, trig=ng to memorize what the light looks like on that tower in my first look of each day. And then, usually, not always, I try to guess what time it is based on where the shadows are, where the light is. Since I keep odd hours, the light is always in a different spot. Past noon, there is no shadow on the tower. Very early in the morning, most of the tower might be in shadow for the sun has not risen high enough to cast out shadow.

Say, what an interesting thing to paint. Sun and shadow.

In Mexican bullfight rings, and in Spain, too, you can buy tickets for Sol or Sombra, Sun or Shade. One costs more than the other. I'm not sure which costs more. Does a bullfighting goer prefer to have the sun in their eyes, to feel the sun on their bodies? Or does a bullfighting fan prefer shade, to keep cool and keep their eyes clear to see the bull gored to death?  i don't know any details because I never went to a bullfight. it was hard to go into a bullfighting stadium and just see the stadium.

Honestly, how can civilized human beings, and millions of them at that, be football fans? Football does not seem very different to me than the Romans throwing Christians into a pit with a lion or two and watch the 'show'.  We know that football batters the brains of the men who play it. We know it is ritualized war. It is a brutal physical battle between opposing teams. What does it say about humans that the stadiums get packed and on Super Bowl Sunday people have parties to watch the war game. Late in life, many of the players will be befuddled, suffering from brain damage. Those are real bodies taking hard hits, literally rattling human brains. That's entertainment?

An acquaintance, a male, told me when I asked him if he watched pro sports. He said he did as a young man bu then he realized it was, as he put it, a colossal waste of time. In recent years, he has formed a close bond with a woman who considers him a key member of her family, her family of friends. She's a big football fan. She is a lovely, brilliant, refined woman but she is one of those fanatical fans of ritualized war, a 'game' in which men are bloodied and battered and we now know their brains are damaged. She's drawn him into going to the ritualized war games and Super Bowl parties.

Soccer?  I love soccer. Baseball. I have enjoyed going to games when a man I loved was into baseball. I liked learning the rules of the game, learning all the subtle things going on in a game, whether sitting in the sun or the shade. Say, wouldn't sol or sombra depend on the time of day? Baseball and football stadiums just sell seats and the pricing is based on how good your view of the game is. I have never heard of sports tickets in USA sold based on sun or shade.  In football, you can to be close to the fifty yard line, close to the middle of the action. In baseball, it is desirable to be behind home plate, or near first or third. And no one wants to be up at the top, far away from the game. The closer you are to the game, the better.

But football?

Now don't get me wrong.  When I was married, I went to tons of college and pro sports games. I did it because my husband (and before that, my boyfriend) loved sports. And I had fun learning about hockey (his game-- captain of his college team), basketball (Kevin Mchale, who went on to be a huge superstar for the Boston Celtics, played as an undergrad at the U. of MN. when we were in law school -- college games were cheap). The U. of MN. hockey team comprised most of the team that won the USA's first gold medal in hockey at the Olympics and the coach of the U of MN team, Herb Brooks, coached that team to Olympic gold. And my ex and I had watched most of the gold medal players and Herb Brooks for years. it made the Olympic hockey games that year so amazing for us. We had watched those young men form into the brillilant players that won that gold medal. We watched Herb Broks coach them, up close. A hockey arena at U of MN, at least back in the seventies, was a fairly cosy affair. I have heard there is a new hockey arena, and basketball arena. I bet the new ones are bigger.  I like small arenas but more seats mean more money.

Whatever happened to Hockney?

Morning pages. Who is the writer who wrote a book on creativity that advises artists, and esp. writers to get up and first thing every single day is to just write for a certain period of time. Keep the pen moving she says. I have owned the book, taken a couple classes designed to follow the book.  Julia Cameron?  That's  a guess and I am not going to stop and google it now. I guess this is a morning pages kind of day. Rambling.

There is so much gorgoeusness, gobsmacing beauty in the Hockney show. Someone could spend the day of the Super Bowl at an art museum instead of watching ritualized war that batters the brains of the atheletes. It's a blood vicious sport and it creeps me out that it is so popular. Soccer is played around the world and I know it can get very intense in some parts of the world. But I don't think the atheletes brains are bludgeons with body checks made by 300 pound coke machines posing as humans.

I had a boyfriend in high school who was the left defensive tackle for his boys' school football team.  he got a football scholarship to a Big 8 school. I have heard the Big 8 and Big 10 have changed since I was in h.s. and I never cared. I think my h.s. boyfriend was stupid. No, I know he was stupid. His first ACT score was so low that the unviersity said he had to take it again and boost his score or he wouldn't get a scholarship or get into their university -- Kansas State or Something State -- a big state university that was not a super star in football, not if they had to recruit my h.s. boyfriend. He was angry when my ACT scores were very high. I am a good test taker, I modestly demurred. I was such a dumb cluck then.

I am a dumb cluck now.

Hockney. He's 76.  He's been making art at least fifty years but he stays abreast of his time. He creates gorgeous pieces using iPads and the digital video capacity in an iPad to create gigantic-sized  videos. I just googled him and a profile categorizes his art as pop art.

I don't think the work I saw yesterday at the DeYoung is pop art. It is high level brilliant art.

In one huge gallery, the walls are covered with Hockney's small reproductions of many classical paintings. He does a kind of span of art history from around 1200 to 2013.  He represents the whole Western canon in this sprawling, gigantic piece. The walls are covered - and it is a very high big room, three sides -- with his small scale reproductions of important art from all those years.

It's a complex piece.   he captures art history but his agenda is bigger than that. It felt to me, for a few instants, as if he was trying to gobble up the all of art history, to get it all embodied in his being. And by compressing so much significant art, showing us the path of the Western canon, he is allowing us to see ourselves in that march of humanity. Plus all of the art he reproduces for the piece is gorgeous art. And it is not just about the pictures. He developed a theory that beginning around 1440, artists used camera obscura so they could paint precisely detailed paintings. I guess he wrote a book about his theory. And then he embodied his theory, showing us how paintings changed, hoping we will see the shift he theorizes occurred around 1440.  I could spend a long time in that room alone. And I will.

It was so much to take in.

I knew it was a big show. And my instinct has been that it would absorb me. So I wanted to go on the first day I could, the members-only preview yesterday, so I could get started.

I would like to be an artist. too late for me.

The life partner of an acquaintance of mine, who is himself a pretty good painter, quite her job after her mom died and her inheritance allowed her to stop working. Turns out she is an artist. I had two prints of her work on my living room walls.  I don't know her very well so I don't know if she always longed to be an artist or if the artist thing is newish. And I know my acquaintance, her life partner, cares a lot about art.

I went to the Diebenkorn with a couple friends on a couple occasions. And once I went with an acquaintance. This is the guy who said "we were never friends, we are just two people who met at a conference" so not a friend. An acquaintance. This same peach of a fellow once told me, three days before Xmas that he no longer wished to consider me a friend and he actually said "I am downgrading you to acquaintance." Taken back, I said 'thank you for telling me' and he said, sounding surprised, "You seem very calm and composed." What did he think? That I would become upset and fuss. In truth, my dad was with me in those moments when he said "i am downgrading you to aquaintance."  I heard Chuck, my dad, saying "If I were you, I'd never give this guy the time of day again.  Anyone that would say that to you isn't worthy of you.' and my dad did talk to me like that. Sometimes. And he would definitely have said that if I told him a male friend had said to me, three days before Xmas no less "I am downgrading you to acquaintance." Downgrading me. Dad would have been right! And that insensitive jerk was right:  we were never friends.ç

My dad said I was a gift and any man that didn't see me as a gift in his life was not worth a single moment of my time.

My dad was particularly wonderful while I was going through a painful custody battle divorce.  he let me vent as much as I wanted, repeating myself a lot. And he would rail about what a jerk the guy was.

A few years after the divorce, in one of the rare phone calls with my ex-husband -- must have had something to do with our daughter, because that is the only reason we ever talked to one another after we divorced -- he brought up my dad and my brother Joe. My dad and Joe had been really nice to my ex when he was my boyfriend, fiance and husband. My ex loved going to pro sports events with my dad. And Joe would roll out the hospitality for him, all warm and friendly. My ex was a knucklehead. A few years after the divorce, on a rare phone call, he said "Say, how is your dad and oe doing? You know, I go to Chicago on business somtimes. I bet if I were in Chicago and called them up, they would invite me to see them, probably go to a game. I bet they would be the same great guys they always were."  I didn't say this to him but I had to suppress what I was thinking:  my dad and Joe had never liked him. They had been nice to him because they loved me. And they hated him for the hell he put me through, abusing me, then asking me to get an abortion and then suing for the baby when I didn't.  What a clueless knucklehead to think the father and brother of the ex-wife he abused, not to mention the financial nightmare that custody battle cost. Everyone in my family helped pay for it. No one was going to let him raise Katie because of money.  My family had never liked him but had always treated him impeccably because he was my husband. But that veneer of civility would be over.

A trickster in my mind wanted to encourage Frank to give my dad and brother a call the next time he was in Chicago. I am pretty sure I know how such a call would call. "Hi Dad, it's me, your daughter's ex husband" and dad would probabl have just slammed down the phone.

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