Harold Mockford - light and dark

Yesterday I gave myself a treat and drove down to the Towner gallery in Eastbourne to see its retrospective of Harold Mockford. To be honest, from the reproduction of his picture in their leaflet, I wouldn't have bothered - and the image above doesn't do him justice either. Luckily for me, a friend told me I had to go and see for myself. Thank you Colin!

Anyway, the picture above is Mockford's When the Lights Come on, and it's wonderful. He's captured completely that feeling of an English winter, of being outside when most other people are already home, turning on their lights, making cups of tea, of looking in and wondering.

Most of the pictures I saw yesterday were painted in Eastbourne and Newhaven and on the South Downs, but they're far from provincial even though their subject is so localised. They're about a particular place, yes, but they're also about place - the energy, solidity and secrets of any where.

Mockford often paints scenes at dusk, so many of his pictures have large areas of shade, or almost complete dark - but they also shine with light. His Newhaven ferries, lamps at level crossings, moonlight on the Long Man at Wilmington pulse with energy in the darkness.

In some of his pictures, he focuses for us and paints in detail only the core of the picture, and leaves its surroundings dark, or roughly painted. The effect is discomfiting - there's something going on here that we don't understand. It's as though suddenly we have tunnel vision and stuff's going on outside our field of vision that he's not letting us see. Even where he paints the whole picture, we know there's more to it than meets the eye - these are landscapes and streets with blood running through their veins. They're vivid, alive.

I wondered as I looked what makes Mockford's pictures so powerful when landscape paintings can be so emotionally flat in less able hands. And I concluded that it's not so much technique - though that's there in spades - but gut feeling. This isn't a man who took a photo of some shapely hill, or unusual park gate, and painted it back in his studio. Mockford paints from memory because these landscapes and streets are part of him. It's like he's painting himself. What's impressive is that he can reveal it to us.

Finally, as a tribute to Mockton, I took a photo as I left the Towner. I love the way he includes arrows on the road in several of his paintings, always pointing away from the picture's apparent focus, sending us off sideways, towards something outside the painting. I hope he'd smile at this one.

David Hockney's purple trees

I went to see the new  David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy last week and in a way all I want to say is, 'Go and see it! It's amazing!'

But that's not terribly thoughtful or reflective. Maybe I find it hard to think of something careful to say because Hockney's new paintings have such an immediate impact - I didn't stand there thinking about them, dissecting his technique, or his repeated symbols of roads and hills, though they're there to be considered. I simply relished the experience of looking - it felt as though Hockney and I had set out on a sunny day on our bikes to explore the East Yorkshire landscape, and whenever we saw something beautiful or surprising, we'd stop, and while I looked at the view, he'd whip out his paints and capture it then and there.

In the exhibition there's one wall of thirty or so pictures, hung en masse - they cover the wall, and they're brilliant, in the sense of shining out at you. The colours are bright, vibrant, and often not at all realistic - but they are what you see when you're out there in a landscape. Hockney has painted the landscape we see, not its photographic image - and that's why I stood and simply grinned in recognition at his painting of Garrowby Hill, with its unfeasible drop and crimson fields - and why the log pile in Winter Timber is perfect in orange, next to its purple tree trunk.

By co-incidence, but proving Hockney's genius perfectly, a couple of days before I saw the Hockney, I took some photos in my own Wealden landscape.
 

They're pretty accurate - it was a cold day, mist was hanging in the bottoms, lining the hillsides. They're not bad pictures - but they in no way capture the joy of being there in the landscape. That's what Hockney does. His paintings are all about that feeling in your gut when you turn a corner and there's the stump of a tree sitting in a flash of sunlight - or when you puff up a hill, turn round at the top and look back down at the vast space laid out below you - or when you walk the same lane every day, and know every bush and every clump of grass, and the day the hazel catkins open, you smile because spring's on its way.

I bought some postcards from the exhibition to remind me of how happy it made me. I could never afford a Hockney for my own wall - I'll just have to look at my postcards and go for a walk instead.