David Hockney and Normandy

Having visited Normandy the previous year in 2018, Hockney relocated to a historic 17th century farmhouse named La Grande Cour with his two assistants. The rustic timber-framed house contained a shack with a cider press, which was renovated to include a small studio for the artist as he began to paint the sinuous branches of the bare winter trees. Winter soon gave way to spring, as blossoms and flowers adorned the landscape around the house.

Creating during this period as part of his My Normandy series, In Front of House Looking West is a scene of Hockney’s cottage and four-acre land. In the original ink drawing, he adopts the same vibrant linework and bold colour palette that he has used in his paintings and iPad drawings. The façade of the house and its red roof is contrasted sharply with the abundant greenery that encircles his home. In this domestic setting, Hockney meditates on place, time, light and the cycle of nature in his immediate surroundings. Paying particularly close attention to surfaces, colours, light and perspective, the cross-over between his painting techniques and digital works is ever-present. The act of sustained looking remains integral to this work and the wider My Normandy series. The same road, trees and house appear time and time again, repeated but never the same.

The emphasis on seasonal transformation connects My Normandy to the earlier series The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, in Yorkshire. In both bodies of work, Hockney observes atmospheric cycles, capturing the subtle changes in season, mood and life inherent within the natural world. In Front of House Looking West and the Normandy works, however, offer an altogether more intimate view of Hockney’s domestic life and home. Confined to the peaceful environs of his house and its immediate landscape, much of Hockney’s time spent living in Normandy was marked by the COVID-19 lockdown, forcing him to look inwards and find inspiration in the everyday subjects that he found surrounding him.

The perspective of In Front of House Looking West contains a foreground and middle ground, but is somewhat flattened and appears to exist on the same pictorial plane. This approach reflects Hockney’s long-standing interest in alternatives to single-point perspective, a concern that has shaped much of his work since the 1970s. Rather than guiding the viewer’s eye towards a traditional, distant vanishing point, Hockney’s all-encompassing perspective encourages a continually roaming gaze. Just as the landscape that he sat down to draw was living and breathing, our eyes move across the surface of his image, noticing textures, colours and relationships between forms, never once settling on any particular element.

This interest in perspective and time is most prevalent in the 90-metre-long iPad frieze, A Year in Normandie (2020-2021), a monumental work on display for the first time in London at the Serpentine exhibition. Echoing Monet’s Water Lilies in its scale, and inspired by Chinese scroll paintings and the Bayeux Tapestry which will be loaned to the British Museum in 2026, A Year in Normandie combines more than 100 iPad drawings which together capture a panorama of the changing seasons. The conception of the work came when Hockney first moved into La Grande Cour in Normandy. His studio was not yet ready, and so the artist began to draw in a Japanese concertina sketchbook that he had bought in Amsterdam. The pages with their fold-out design allowed Hockney’s drawings to freely flow into one another, meaning that he could depict the temporally changing landscape from many different vantage points over time. Speaking in 2019 about finding inspiration in the Bayeux Tapestry, he said, ‘It covers about four years of time, so it is made like a Chinese scroll… The arrival of spring takes about six weeks in Normandy, so I intend to do it like a scroll. It’s a movie, but you do the moving.’

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