Recently I borrowed a book (That’s the Way I See It) by David Hockney from the library. I have not been a great fan of his work but, probably influenced by the Hockneyizer Flickr toy I was playing around with a few months ago (see my result) and also caught by the promised of the title, it had my attention.

I particularly appreciated some of his comments and examples around the ideas of photos and printing. The Scrabble Game image which I have linked to is the one that stood out to me. I understood that the process was not just to break the image up into squares and then paste it back together (as the Hockneyizer does) but to capture time as well as space. It is not merely a series of snapshots of people playing scrabble but a composition that takes you through a game, drawing out the emotions expressed by the participants.

That in turn leads back to the work of painters such as Picasso; appreciated as a view of a period of time rather than just a frozen instant, the distortions move from apparent childishness to a deeper, more considered way of seeing. I want to take the digital paintbrush of my camera and explore the same perspectives rather than relying on a program to create a pale simulacrum.