David Hockney - I'm excited

Some months ago I saw David Hockney's documentary 'A Secret Knowledge' and it changed my world, for a short time. As I tend to do, I immediately rang my dad, then my older sister who is getting into Art, and raved about it for about an hour each. If you've never seen it, David identified links in the way artists used to depict the world in their pictures, and then identified a fundamental change. He goes on to discover the secret science behind that change.

Apart from opening my eyes to pictures I'd only ever glanced at for years as an art student, it showed me how passionate Hockney is about works of art, and about the making of art. He was intelligent, down to earth, passionate, excitable even. This was a guy I wanted to learn more about.

Jump forward to this Christmas and I get a book about David Hockney from said sister, Mel. The foreword alone by Paul Melia dn Ulrich Luckhardt was full of ideas and questions before I'd got to page 9. My mind already buzzing, I flicked through images of Hockney's work and saw the journey he'd taken. Then I stopped dead on page 155, a drawing of a Van Gogh-esque woven yellow chair, drawn with an altered perspective. He explains "In the theory of one-point perspective the vanishing point is infinity and the viewer is an immobile point outside the picture. If the infinite is God, we never connect, but if perspective is reversed the infinity is everywhere, infinity is everywhere, infinity is everywhere and the viewer is now mobile (is this better theologically?)."

This alteration in perspective grabs me and holds me. I know it's wrong but there seems to be some kind of truth to what he's trying to portray here. I am mad? There's potential here for me to investigate. It ties in the with 'Trudging' image I've been playing with for a while which depicts an altered perspective of a pavement and the buildings rising up on either side.