Traditional Materials & Techniques

Students could do this same project without the use of a computer, by using either a disposable or standard camera and getting the photos developed by the use of photo finishing. Students would have to get doubles of the photographs.

Digital Technology

This 3 to 5 session lesson will make use of the computer, digital camera, and printer as the equipment taking the place of the traditional photo developing systems. Students will take photos with the digital camera and can either print them out and assemble them into a photo collage in the traditional manner, or assemble the photos within the computer itself.

Lesson Objectives:

Technical (plain)

Formal

Contextual

Conceptual/Expressive

Required Material(s):

Required Resource(s):

Preparation

It is a moot point as to whether the most extraordinary innovation of 20th-century art was Cubism or Pop Art. Both arose from a rebellion against an accepted style: the Cubists thought Post-Impressionist artists were too tame and limited, while Pop Artists thought the Abstract Expressionists pretentious and over-intense. Pop Art brought art back to the material realities of everyday life, to popular culture (hence ``pop''), in which ordinary people derived most of their visual pleasure from television, magazines, or comics.

Hockney, David (1937- ). Born in 1937 at Bradford. Between 1953 and 1957 he studied at the Bradford School of Art. A conscientious objector, he spent his National Service working in a hospital until 1959. From 1959 to 1962 he studied at the Royal College of Art, London. Here he met R. B. Kitaj and other founders of English Pop Art, and saw American Abstract Expressionist paintings. From 1960 he began showing in the Young Contemporaries exhibitions at the RBA Galleries and read the Complete Works of Walt Whitman. By 1961 he had done his first Tea Paintings and Love Paintings, painted compositions consisting of consumer goods images and psychograms. More than any others, these pictures showed his proximity to Pop Art. In 1961 he was represented at the Paris Biennale and awarded the Guiness Award for Etching. He also visited New York for the first time. He taught at Maidstone College of Art in 1962. In 1963 he travelled to Egypt and Los Angeles, where he met Henry Geldzahler, Andy Warhol and Dennis Hopper. He did his first paintings of showers at this time. From 1963 to 1964 he taught at the University of Iowa. In 1964 he settled in Los Angeles, painted his first swimming-pool pictures and made his first polaroids. From 1965 to 1967 he held teaching posts at the University of Colorado and the University of California, Berkeley. In 1967 he travelled to Italy and France, and in 1968 to Germany and Ireland. He had a retrospective exhibition in London in 1970, also shown at Hanover and Rotterdam. Between 1973 and 1975 he lived in Paris. An exhibition of his works was shown at the Mus‰e des Arts D‰coratifs in 1974. He designed the set for Igor Stravinsky's "The Rake's Progress" in 1975. In 1976 he returned to Los Angeles and worked intensively with photography. In 1978 he designed the d‰cor for Mozart's "The Magic Flute", produced at the Glyndebourne Festival, and in 1980 he developed a program for the Metropolitan Opera with works by Satie, Poulenc, Ravel and Stravinsky. In 1981 he travelled in China, following which China Diary (with Stephen Spender) was published by Thames and Hudson. He designed covers for VOGUE in 1984 and 1985, the set for Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde"at the Los Angeles Music Center in 1986-87, and carpet patterns for a company in 1988.

Ian Washing His Hair' - one of David Hockney's best known photocollages - reflects the artist's intense interest, as a draughtsman and painter, in the way that we see. Although in 1976 Hockney famously dismissed the single momentary view afforded by conventional photography, by the early 80s photography had superseded painting in his work. For Hockney, photocollage, a technique he discovered in 1982, mirrored the actual mechanics of visual perception. The overlapping arrangement of snapshots in 'Ian Washing His Hair' forces the viewer to see the image as a composite of fragments. This reflects the process by which the eyes instantaneously scan an object and feed a mass of images to the brain, which automatically synthesizes them into a unified image. Hockney links his own interest in this scientific understanding of seeing with the early Cubism of Picasso and Braque. The subject of 'Ian Washing His Hair' is the artist's friend Ian Falconer. The action of washing hair is conveyed by a loosely sequential arrangement of blurred images showing Ian's hands move from the water to his head. In contrast, all the objects in the room appear in focus and static. The qualities of time and movement suffusing the work are precisely those lacking in conventional photography according to Hockney.

Motivational Strategies

Evaluation Criteria/Reflection: