Embracing technology
In 2001, David Hockney stirred up some controversy when he published a book packed with pictures that argued — visually and convincingly — that many of the greatest painters of the Renaissance, including Jan van Eyck, Hans Holbein and Michelangelo Caravaggio, used specially fabricated glass lenses to compose their amazingly realistic masterpieces.
Most of the scholars and commentators who opposed Hockney’s ideas acted as if he had accused the Old Masters of cheating — of tracing the figures in their pictures rather than drawing them freehand. That was hardly Hockney’s point.
But the tattletale mentality of his detractors blinded them to the most exciting implications of his thinking: that advanced technology and the artist’s hand can work in concert to make images that move viewers by satisfying our senses while blowing our minds.
That’s what happens at L.A. Louver in “David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Part 1 of 3.” Compositionally, the 20 landscapes that make up the 77-year-old British artist’s 30th solo show in L.A. are perfectly ordinary.
In all but a few, a country lane leads your eye into a copse of trees whose newly blossomed leaves catch the sunshine and cast shadows on the ground below, creating f lickering patterns that seem to be animated.
That’s just the beginning. Nearly every square inch of every large image is made up of strokes, dabs and flecks of shimmering color, not a sin- gle one of which runs into another, muddying things up. Both casual and dazzling, the clarity has lots in common with the way the world looks when you’re attuned to its nuances and every blade of grass appears to be a glorious symphony of color, texture and form.
The effect also recalls watercolors, painted by a virtuoso. But Hockney’s images are crisper and more vivid, their marks less organic and liquid than synthetic and gaseous — like rays of electronically transmitted light.
More important, the depth Hockney gets into his surfaces is impossible with watercolors. Most important, it’s a pleasure to get lost in, your eyeballs weaving their way through the sensuous spaces his luminous surfaces open.
It’s hard to believe that Hockney’s images are prints and that he drew them with a plastic stylus — and his fingertips — on the screen of an ordinary iPad, with off-theshelf software.
If you’ve always assumed that handmade works, like paintings and drawing, provide satisfactions that cannot be had from digital images, you’re in for a big surprise. Hockney’s lyrical pictures of the English countryside around his childhood home compel viewers of all ages to throw off old-fashioned ideas about the supposedly intrinsic opposition between manually crafted and machine-made works.
That’s exactly what Hockney did 13 years ago in “Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters.” His newest works are so beautiful that they may even persuade the tattletales to change their tune. L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., (310) 822-4955, through Aug. 29. Closed Saturdays and Sundays. www.lalouver.com
A region gets transported
“Driving LA” paints a fas- cinating picture of the profound ways cars and freeways have changed Los Angeles and the way we perceive our surroundings.
At Craig Krull Gallery, transformations to the city’s infrastructure are clearly evident in the 63 photographs and one artist’s book, which span almost 90 years, from 1926 to 2013.
The two earliest, by E.O. Hoppe, show a forest of oil derricks covering Signal Hill and a filling station sand- wiched between signs advertising gas for 2 cents a gallon and “The Girl Behind the Pump.”
The most recent, by John Humble, Jeff Brouws, Michael Light and Mark Swope, depict a landscape made possible — and precarious — by freeways, their benefits and pitfalls a big part of everyday life.
In between are stunning shots that record L.A.’s lovehate relationship with cars. Romance and glamour play major roles in Julius Shulman’s sexy pictures of dealers’ showrooms and Julian Wasser’s nighttime shots of famous bars and even more famous boulevards.
Clear-eyed objectivity gives a gritty kick to John Swope’s unsentimental pictures from the ’30s and ’40s, George Tate’s from the ’50s and ’60s, Malcolm Lubliner’s from the ’70s and Tim Bradley’s from the ’80s.
The transformation of L.A.’s landscape goes handin-glove with the transformation of the way we see our surroundings and make sense of them.
About half of the photos describe a world seen from a pedestrian’s perspective. In them, “the street” actually means “the sidewalk.” Reality is made up of face-to-face interactions.
In the other half, something new emerges: a car’s-eye view of the city.
It appears in three 1949 silver prints by Richard C. Miller, each measuring only 4 by 5 inches and showing, mostly, the hood of his car and the road ahead. Urban details are pushed to the margins — both of the picture and of life in the big city.
Today, the repercussions of that transformation are still with us. Although electronically illuminated screens have replaced windshields as the lenses through which we perceive just about everything, they have not brought back the face-toface interactions that once defined urban life. Craig Krull Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 828-6410, through Aug. 23. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.craigkrullgallery.com