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Aside from the painting, there are photographs of Hockney at work, with captions explaining technical details of how the painting was made. As well, there is a short film with headphones about the work’s manufacture which is narrated by Hockney himself, and which I found to be a valuable addition. There is also children‘s reading area. The lighting was a little off, with some areas of the painting in shadow and others made shiny, but the overall setting - white walls and well assembled room - did its job of allowing the work to dominate.
The painting itself is as spectacular as the amount of work it took to create it. An east Yorkshire copse of bare sycamore trees takes the fore with fields on one side and houses on the other. Firstly, the eye is drawn to the centre, darkest and biggest tree in the painting. This tree is painted very strikingly, using strong lines and very robust brush-strokes. From here, the eyes moves back into the rest of the copse, where the trees are painted more simply but with no less detail in lighter browns and greens, with peachy-pink highlighting and the same coloured light shining through. This light, combined with the crystal clear sky of the palest blue, brings to mind an early spring sunrise and lends the painting a hopeful, anticipatory sense of nature on the verge of breaking out into wild growth.
This is consolidated by the colours Hockney uses to create the surrounding landscape. The fields and buildings are made up of jewel-like jade, emerald, blues, turquoise and reds which are exaggerated versions of the true colours, and lend the background of the painting the same sense of colour straining to burst out of the canvas. Move closer, and even the shrubs and leafless hedgerows are made up of a kaleidoscope of colours, all painted with an energy conveyed in the quick, bold brushstrokes and the short space of time taken to create the whole work. Here and there are little yellow daffodils; bright splashes of light which are the first to make it out of the brown ground.
The main tree dominates the picture, covering 30 canvases and towering over the viewer, emphasising the potential of nature. To accentuate their power, periphery images of the houses, hedgerows and fields are somewhat stunted, given a skewed proportionality to the painting. The branches reach up and out to the edges of the painting, and although you can follow each tree to its green-edged tips, the intertwined branches also melt into each other, making intricate patterns of light and shape. Patterns also appear when you look at individual canvases, which become quite abstract and interesting in themselves.
Bigger Trees is quick and immediate, with infinite and quiet grandeur at the same time. It is beautifully simple and wonderfully intricate all at once.
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