David Hockney
Woldgate Lane to Burton Agnes, 2007
48 x 36 inches (each)
48 x 72 inches (overall)
49 x 73 inches (framed)
Courtesy the artist and L.A. Louver, Venice, CA

During the 2000s, drawn by the memory of a landscape from his youth, David Hockney traveled from his home in Los Angeles to East Yorkshire, England, to make a series of paintings of Woldgate Woods. He worked outdoors, directly from nature, in the nineteenth-century tradition of British plein air painters such as John Constable and J. M. W. Turner. In this view of Woldgate Lane, Hockney used two canvases in order to make an easily portable, large-scale work that conveyed the landscape's scope as he experienced it. Blades of grass, individually rendered in vibrant green brushstrokes, provide points of focus in the foreground, while softer patches of color recede into the distance. While Hockney accurately captured the vistas of the East Yorkshire countryside, he also directs the viewer's focus, creating a space where the expansive becomes intimate.