Painter David Hockney loves reverse perspective, where a painting’s lines converge toward the viewer. He comments:
Interviewer: Can you talk a little about the use of reverse perspective in these paintings?
David Hockney: As you know, the tyranny of vanishing-point perspective is something I’ve been obsessed about for years now—what it does to us—it’s gotten so as I can’t even watch television anymore because of the way the box focuses one’s gaze down that narrowing—
Interviewer: Like a funnel.
David Hockney: Yes, when all I want to do is just the opposite. Did I every tell you the story about the time when I was in Milan, doing The Magic Flute at La Scala, and I took a drive to Zurich with Ian Falconer? And they’d just built this tunnel under the St. Gotthard Pass. The tunnel is about twenty-three kilometers long, of which about nineteen kilometers are a straight line. And, when we entered it, we were the only car entering. So all you saw was this rectangle ahead of you tapering relentlessly down to a single point in the middle, way up ahead. We were going on and on like this, and I said to Ian, “This is like living in one-point-perspective hell, this tunnel. Never have I experienced anything like this.” One found oneself longing so powerfully for the opposite, which at last one finally got, emerging from the tunnel.
Interviewer: A sort of opening out.
David Hockney: Exactly. Oh, I loved it. I love it. I love it, and I’ve never, ever forgotten that.
(Quoted from page 105 of True to Life: Twenty-five years of conversations with David Hockney, by Lawrence Weschler. University of California Press, 2008.)
For some images of reverse perspective, click here.
For a brief biography of David Hockney, click here. For images of or relating to David Hockney, click here.
For information about Lawrence Weschler, the book’s author and the interviewer, click here.
Comments