Page 26 - Studio International - May 1966

tive shading. The black and white drawings do not imi- or decorative Hockney's colour will beguile the eye. Per- •
tate; they declare. Where they employ patterns of black haps my chief objection to it is that it is too harmonious—
and white, flat shapes and degrees of saturation order the too self-conscious—as the line never is—and sometimes •
space; not only the specific place—a building, for instance too casual, as if the hard work of seeing in colour hadn't
—is given, but its environment is suggested by the way the been done.
subject is drawn. An important aspect of Hockney's work is the attention
The drawings in colour fail to achieve this purity. They he gives to the theme of art. His drawings are apt to
are more playful—and more wasteful, however charming. quote styles and conventions, testing them, mocking
Usually, they are coloured drawings and not drawings them, making jokes with them (sometimes against him-
in colour. The linear forms, patterns, and graphic energies self), using them to deepen the viewer's responses. But
are in no inevitable relationship to the hues. Colour also this habit of mind and hand offers a constant medita-

serves rather as a gloss upon or support of the meaning tion upon the means and modes the draughtsman has in
as sheer line or pattern. his control. His style at its best achieves a startling visual
Sometimes, of course, there is a coming-together of the synthesis, often of apparent opposites or seeming irre-

colouristic elements and the graphic ones—more often concilables. The disparities of past and present are then
now, I think, than in the past. This certainly can give an made to work together; form, feeling, and even colour are
•
added resonance to feeling. But even at its most arbitrary rendered as one. n

Two boys in bed 1966
Pen and ink
10x 12+ in.