Art News

David Hockney returns to his native Yorkshire in A Bigger Picture by filmmaker Bruno Wollheims

SAN JOSE, CA.- David Hockney: Bigger Picture is film-maker Bruno Wollheim’s account of David Hockney’s return to his native Yorkshire, after 25 years of living in California. Filmed over three years, it finds the artist at a crisis point in his life and art. Hockney has come back to oil painting after a six-year break, for the first time working outside, directly from nature, en plein air. At the age of 70, he is painting through the seasons and in all weathers. He also wants to be filmed at work – another first. It emerges that Hockney wants to co-opt the documentary on an anti-photographic mission to prove the superiority of painting as visual truth. His recent work on the controversial book and film Secret Knowledge has convinced him that Western art for the last 500 years has embraced a photographic view of the world, and that he must abandon the camera, up to then the mainstay of his art. The film traces Hockney’s uneasy love affair with photography and