"Lawrence Weschler's portrait of David Hockney is intimate, playful, and intellectually provocative. Beginning with an essay on Hockney's complex and ravishing photo collages, Weschler chronicles the artist's protean production and speculations: his scenic designs for opera, his homemade xerographic prints, his exploration of physics and its relation to Chinese landscape painting, his gripping investigations of the possibility that the old masters deployed optical devices - cameras - in their painting, his taking up of watercolor, and then, in what may be his most sumptuously productive phase yet, his spectacular return to oil painting, about 2004, with a series of vivid landscapes of the East Yorkshire countryside of his youth. These conversations provide an astonishing record of what has been Hockney's grand endeavor, nothing less than an extended exploration of "the structure of seeing" itself."--BOOK JACKET.
