May Blossom on the Roman Road, 2009, sketch of the painting.Each picture is roughly two metres high by five wide and is made up of eight canvases, two deep and four long. The joins between them impose a grid on the work's surface, suggestive of Modernism but also allowing us to take in a vista that would otherwise be too large to see. More than this, the gridded surface of the Three Trees pictures places a distance between us and the landscape, so that seeing becomes remembering, an act tinged with loss. The trees themselves have the Englishness of Constable or Rudolph Ackermann, a love of place made urgent by Hockney's having once misplaced it. And his talents as a colourist, as a painter of coded forms, come to the fore in this quartet. Up close, the ploughed field of Autumn dissolves into dots, some of them in a very un-Yorkshire shocking pink. And yet the feel is absolutely that of a field in autumn, a time of day.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/david-hockney-ra-a-bigger-picture-royal-academy-of-arts-london-6292725.html
