A Perspective on Perspective. David Hockney.

When David Hockney died a couple of weeks ago, I read three obituaries on his life. To be honest, I knew very little about him.

I read obituaries in The Wall Street Journal, in The Economist and in The New York Times. 

Of course, I "liked Hockney." Which is like saying you like chocolate ice cream or 48%-bonuses or a cold drink on a scorching day. 

I also like Taschen, the great publisher of art books. They fairly main-line on high-grade Hockney.

The book with him in the red suspenders is sitting about 15 inches from my left elbow as I type this. You can buy it here.

But liking someone and knowing something about him (besides a loose appreciation for his art) are different. So, I read.

This time, the icing on the obituary cake came from the Times. Midway through their piece they featured this book, by Hockney, in which Hockney examines the technology old masters used to paint their masterpieces.

You can buy the book here.

Some years ago, I saw a documentary on Vermeer called "Tim's Vermeer," that touched the same topic. You can find the movie on YouTube and rent it for the price of two cups of coffee.

Somehow examining the technology behind craft seemed like the kind of thing those of us still in the ad industry might consider. Especially at a time when many people posit that technology (AI) will subsume or overwhelm craft.

OK. I bought the book.

It cost $37.19 and come from a bookstore in Rancho Cucamonga, California. That in itself was worth at least $25. It sounds like a place Bugs Bunny would approve of. 

The inside front cover had this spread. 

That in itself was worth thousands. 

Perspective.

On the left, a Byzantine mosaic from Sicily in 1150. Facing it, a Van Gogh from 1889. Two seemingly similar portraits made almost three-quarters of a millennium apart.

Four eyes, searing.

My photographs of these sort of things always suck. And despite the proclivities of anyone brought up on screens not with books, there's absolutely no comparison between looking at these images here and holding them in a 12x16" book. Or in the case of a spread 12X32".

The point--reducing years of work by Hockney to a single sentence or two--is that what Hockney does, what artists do, even--if we're doing it right, what we in advertising do is the same.

We look at things people have seen over and over again. Things we've seen so often that we hardly even see them any more. And we make them new.

We make bland grand.
We make old bold.
We make prosaic elegiac.

What we're supposed to be doing is finding a way at looking at things we've seen a million times and seeing them in an entirely new way.

We're suppose to flip upside down. Look backward. Turn night into day.

We're supposed to alter perspectives.

It's only by altering perspectives that the oh-so-usual world all around us becomes worth seeing again in a new light from a new angle.

That's why I bought Secret Knowledge.

I won't ever be an expert on the intricacies of Hockney's thesis. Frankly, I'm not even entirely sure I understand it. I'm an ignoramus with no art education--except for one lesson in college when in the course of one class I was introduced to JMW Turner and William Hogarth.

These two plates below force a looking at the world in ways you hain't seen it before.

I know this though.

When I started in this business and had to come up with the requisite three ads that would make a campaign, it took me at least a week of struggle. 

Today, I believe the test for a campaign isn't three ads. It's fifty. And to come up with fifty, you must abide by my thesis in this flimsy post.

You must keep looking at things differently, oddly, backwards. Keep poking, tugging, crumpling, fighting, starting over until you train yourself to see. 

More importantly
re-see.
re-see.
re-see.
re-see.

See?