Michael Moriarty

Digital Imaging: Photocubism

​

​

In the 1980’s and 90’s artist David Hockney who had been known for his paintings such as A Closer Winter Tunnel, Beverly Hills Housewife, and A Bigger Grand Canyon started experimenting with photography. Hockney started composing large abstracted scenes made up of dozens and dozens of photographs that recreated the original scene. Each individual photograph would be taken from a different viewpoint than the original view of the scene. One would think if dozens and dozens of photographs were all taken from different angles the scene would be unrecognizable, but when Hockney printed the images and "stitched" them together they still represented the original scene, albeit in a distorted, altered way. Hockney’s pieces were created to be in discussion with the great cubist works of such artists as Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, and Georges Braque, which is why Hockney started calling these reconstructed photomontages: Photocubism. George Washington artists will be working with very similar processes that Hockney used to create his Photocubist works by recreating a subject or place that holds special significance to them.