Colour Arcadia

Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself the revelation.

James Turrell, Occluded Front (1985)

A painting David Hockney knows intimately, affectionately, is The Baptism of Christ by Piero della Francesca. He goes so far as to paint a reproduction of a reproduction of it in his 1977 work, Looking at Pictures on a Screen, in which a dapper Henry Geldzahler ponders the artist’s homage to historical masters, as if asking what the modern artist sees in these classical images. For Hockney it was the light, and it is the same clarifying light infusing the della Francesca which illuminates Hockney’s recent huge treescapes. A thin yet bright light in which colours, even pale colours, become radiant.

We read the light because it is more than the necessary provider of vision. Light has character; it can be moody, poetic, penetrating. And it has meaning. It is Christ who is the light of the world, illuminating the landscape in the della Francesca, just as in the Hockney it is a winter sun. Light enables us to see more than just