David Hockney Picture Views
If you're a fan of photography, you're probably familiar with the English photographer David Hockney's pictures. Hockney's trademark is taking a photo and treating it as a panorama that can be sliced up into sub-components that can then be rearranged to substantially alter the effect of the original photo. How can you do the same with your own photos? Scott Photographics has a fantastic step-by-step tutorial on doing so, found here, and it involves using the open source graphics application GIMP. The Hockney-style tutorial is just one of many imaginative things you can do with GIMP, and here are many more resources for it.
Technically, it is true to say that the Pop movement started with Richard Hamilton and David Hockney in England. Hockney's early work made superb use of the popular magazine-style images on which much of Pop Art is based. However, when Hockney moved to California in the 1960s, he responded with such artistic depth to the sea, sun, sky, young men, and luxury that his art took on a wholly new, increasingly naturalistic dimension. Though one might consider A Bigger Splash a simplistic rather than a simplified view of the world, it nevertheless creates a delightful interplay between the stolid pink verticals of a Los Angeles setting and the exuberance of spray as the unseen diver enters the pool. There is no visible human presence here, just that lonely, empty chair and a bare, almost frozen world. Yet that wild white splash can only come from another human, and a great deal of Hockney's psyche is involved in the mix of lucidity and confusion of this picture.
David Hockney Picture Images
