The tunnel early autumn, October 2005, sketch from the painting.A quick dip into the adjoining room of vintage Hockneys shows that this ability to evoke rather than replicate has always been his strong suit. In student works such as Fields, Eccleshill (1956), he paints in the fashion of the day. By his early twenties, though, Hockney has found his own way of encoding landscapes in shapes and colours that have nothing to do with reality but are entirely recognisable as real. No Yorkshire house has ever been the Jaffa-orange of the ones in The Road to York through Sledmere, and yet the colour resonates in the way that red brick does in the long-shadowed late afternoon. It is more than just prettiness. Hockney's look is decorative for sure, but then so was Matisse's
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/david-hockney-ra-a-bigger-picture-royal-academy-of-arts-london-6292725.html
