Hockney, in David Hockney: Looking at landscape! Big spaces: that’s what was getting into my head. Few major artists have chosen to grapple with the Grand Canyon — notoriously difficult given its vast scale; the most recent of them is David Hockney. The full expression of this would be to paint the Grand Canyon. Hockney began work on the National Gallery of Australia’s A bigger Grand Canyon in February 1998. A Bigger Grand Canyon (right detail) National Gallery of Australia © 1999 David Hockney, ‘Hollywood at the end of the street’ For recent examinations of the role of Cubism, photo-collages etc., see Reinhold Misselbeck (ed), David Hockney: Retrospektive photoworks, Cologne: Editions Braus, Museum Ludwig Köln, 1997; Gerard Regnier and Didier Ottinger (eds), David Hockney: Dialogue avec Picasso, Paris: Musée Picasso, Editions de Ia reunion des musées nationaux, 1999. Hockney, in David Hockney: Looking at landscape/ being in landscape (1998), p.5. Marco Livingstone commented that 'A Bigger Grand Canyon places the viewer so convincingly at the canyon's south rim at Powell Point, one of the most spectacular vantage points, as to induce in some the vertiginous thrill of standing on the edge of a precipice so deep and extensive that it almost defies the imagination.'6. It is a most suitable subject for a painter obsessed with space — how you perceive it, how you depict it. I thought that was marvelous.’ In Hockney’s view, music is ‘an art of time and of movement and so driving a car though a landscape ... they have connections ... [with] Nature doing the lighting’. Brilliance of colour and vastness of space characterised the world of dreams when Hockney was growing up in the then heavily industrialised North of England. These works formed the basis for Composition study for A Bigger Grand Canyon.’ 12 In February 1998, Hockney began work on the 60 canvas A Bigger Grand Canyon. He sets the landscape within the English Romantic tradition: ‘The genre of landscape has been important to Hockney since the beginning of his professional career.

The artist’s solution for his two-dimensional image of the Grand Canyon was to take a series of photographs which, with their multiple vanishing points, he placed together as the collage, Grand Canyon with ledge, Arizona, 1982. 11

20 On Hockney's obsession with the theme of landscape and space, see David Hockney Espace/Paysage (1999), passim. His Grand Canyon painting, according to Livingstone, recalls 'the magnificent spectacle of the Hollywood cinema which had helped draw him [Hockney] to the American West while he was a young boy day dreaming in Bradford'.89A Bigger Grand Canyon is rich in golds, crimsons, scarlets, oranges, ochres and browns, and contrasts of brilliant blues and greens. 8 In 1982 David Hockney took a series of photographs of the Grand Canyon that he placed together to form a collage. He reminded Hockney of a favourite quotation of his, from the writings of the astronomer Carl Sagan, which reads, in part: ‘How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought!