A Bigger Picture

I've only heard good things about the David Hockney exhibition 'The Bigger Picture' at the Royal Academy.

One friend said that everybody left radiant, after all that colour. I think I can believe that. That friend also said (and I will talk to her about this) that Hockney has transfigured the strangest of places, the East Riding of Yorkshire.

I am from the easily overlooked East Riding of Yorkshire. Only till seven, but still, seven years. It was as radiant a place as anywhere. I don't think Hockney has introduced colour into a grey place, and I don't think he is claiming that. I do wonder why we do that. Why we dismiss the light and nature and growth and colour that come from places we are not taught to expect them? No one ever expects anything to come from the East Riding of Yorkshire, not even John Prestcott. (That sentence can be read in different ways. I am happy with that.)

I think it is not accidental or incidental that to get the Bigger Picture you have to focus in on the smaller picture, on the picture of small places. There's a theology here too.