.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
The Snake represents Hockney's preoccupation with style and more specifically, with the flatness of the paint surface.
"At that time I was much more conscious of the current ideas about painting. For instance, flatness: flatness was something that people really talked about then, and I was interested in it. Everyone was going on about Jasper Johns's pictures: here was the flatness thing, and it appeared in later abstractions too. The Snake is my comment on it, a version of it, in that the only illusion is that inside the frame the snake is lying on a canvas; the canvas itself isn't painted. The handmade frame is meant to suggest a mechanical version of the snake. The starting point of this picture was an attempt to animate a target, which was a popular theme among students at the time--it was probably derived from Kenneth Noland and Johns. I wanted to give my target painting a completely different subject, but all the time there was this idea of flatness. I thought it was something I should be involved in" (D. Hockney, quoted in N. Stangos, ed., David Hockney on David Hockney, New York, 1976, pp. 87-88.).
Kenneth Noland, Spring Cool, 1962 c Kenneth Noland/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
"At that time I was much more conscious of the current ideas about painting. For instance, flatness: flatness was something that people really talked about then, and I was interested in it. Everyone was going on about Jasper Johns's pictures: here was the flatness thing, and it appeared in later abstractions too. The Snake is my comment on it, a version of it, in that the only illusion is that inside the frame the snake is lying on a canvas; the canvas itself isn't painted. The handmade frame is meant to suggest a mechanical version of the snake. The starting point of this picture was an attempt to animate a target, which was a popular theme among students at the time--it was probably derived from Kenneth Noland and Johns. I wanted to give my target painting a completely different subject, but all the time there was this idea of flatness. I thought it was something I should be involved in" (D. Hockney, quoted in N. Stangos, ed., David Hockney on David Hockney, New York, 1976, pp. 87-88.).
Kenneth Noland, Spring Cool, 1962 c Kenneth Noland/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY