A different way of seeing the landscape

“Isn’t that amazing,” he would tell me.

“It’s just rocks,” I would say, ever the grumpy teenager.

“It’s huge, it’s glacial.”

“No, it isn’t, it’s dull.”

I loved art but I could not understand my dad’s fascination with countryside images.

However, I am beginning to wonder if landscapes might be a bit like coffee, and wine, and cabbage. You only really ‘get it’ when you’re older.

I say that because this week I saw David Hockney’s massive London exhibition, A Bigger Picture, and it was far from dull.

The Royal Academy rooms were full of his canvases of East Yorkshire countryside, where he was brought up.

This was a massive collection of landscapes - but with a difference. Unlike the rainy view of the fields a camera lens might have collected, Hockney’s northern England was like something from a psychedelic computer game gone haywire.

There were fluorescent magenta pink fields and sherbet orange hills with massive geometric hedges.

His trademark bright colours, which I’ve seen before in his images of LA, now appeared in the trees and lanes. His interest in technology showed up in blown-up iPad drawings.

It was Yorkshire, but warped, and the interesting elements were all the ways it had been twisted from reality.

Hockney painted most canvases from sketches or memory, over the course of one year. Somewhere between the field and the exhibition he moulded his home countryside into something different.

On my train back up to the North, the following day, I looked out of the window and watched the scenery, from Euston station to Warrington, to Preston to Kendal.

I tried to imagine the world as Hockney paints it. Because I think, more than anything, the exhibition had more to do with Hockney himself, and the way he crafts his world, than it had to do with Yorkshire.

His paintings show landscape as biography. Hockney, dressed in Yorkshire. And world where it doesn’t rain, even in the North.

It’s powerful stuff.