David Hockney is better known as a portrait painter, but moving in 2005 from Hollywood back to his childhood town in England’s East Yorkshire inspired him to create these poppy landscape paintings. He spent much of the past year sitting in a field with an easel, quickly painting the lush scenes before him, and then attaching, in some cases, up to fifteen canvases together for works as wide as 27 feet. The resulting images, now showing at both the uptown and downtown PaceWildenstein galleries, are like Van Gogh meets The Wizard of Oz: wide, curvy paths painted violet and apricot; leafless fall trees with fat trunks; soggy meadows rendered in greens and purples. Art critic Roberta Smith once wrote that Hockney’s work “is often as hard to resist as it is to take seriously.” So don’t resist — click through our fifteen images.
