For many years John Jones has been supplying high quality canvases to renowned artist David Hockney. David Hockney has recently donated his largest work to the Tate. “The Tate had been asking me for some time for a work of art,” Hockney said. “I felt a duty and as an Englishman I wanted to give something to Tate Britain.” The painting is a 40ft x 15ft work that consists of 50 separate John Jones canvases. David Hockney set up his easel en plein air to create Bigger Trees Near Warter (2007) which is a Yorkshire landscape. He works on relatively small canvases, producing three to four a day as studies for his larger works. “It’s only having seen a tree’s inner structure, with its branches laid bare in winter,” Hockney explains, that one “learns to experience, and then to render, that tree’s subsequent summer fullness—and then vice versa.” As Hockney paints plein air he had to conceive a way to overcome transportation and the Yorkshire elements of rain, wind and snow. His studies developed into a series of canvases measuring 108 x 144’’ which could be placed on an easel and then transported back to his studio. The John Jones canvases are designed to be manageable yet sturdy enough to take into the field. In this particular work Hockney’s assistants photographed the individual canvases assembling them in Photoshop so Hockney could see how the pieces were working together, ultimately making a large scale multicanvas work that now hangs in the Tate.
Click here for related article in the Times
Hockney is now showing recent work at New York gallery Pace Wildenstein. Tim Blake one of our frame designers worked closely with Hockney to frame this exhibition.
Hockney also has a retrospective of his work from 1960 - 68 at Nottingham Contemporary which opened on November 14th.
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