By Paul Varnell

Contributing writer

David Hockney (1937- ) is a celebrated British artist who was at first loosely associated with the 1960s “pop art” movement because of his early, simplified style. But he moved beyond that narrow category with his creation of etchings, portraits, composite photographs and stage designs.

He is perhaps best known for his paintings of young men in swimming pool scenes set in Southern California, marked particularly by the play of sunlight refracted through the water on the pool bottom.

The Arts Club of Chicago is presenting “David Hockney: ‘Looking at Woldgate Woods,’” a small exhibition of 10 of his recent landscape paintings of a particular spot in the woods in East Yorkshire (where he grew up) where a single path divides into three paths—to the right, left, and straight ahead. The paintings all have exactly the same viewpoint but vary in the time of day and season of the year they capture, reminding one of Monet’s series of paintings of haystacks or the Rouen Cathedral.

Nine of the paintings are large, six by nine feet, composed of two horizontal rows of three smaller, more manageable units, three by four feet, that Hockney could take with him into the woods where he painted them in the open air. They are then mounted together to create one larger painting. Although they do not exactly match up, they come close, and from across the room they make what appears to be one large painting. A 10th painting of the same scene, just three by four feet, was painted from memory in his studio

The chief interest in the paintings is Hockney’s attention to the colors of the foliage and the sky and to the play of light, whether direct sunlight or the more diffuse light of cloudy days.

“In order to truly convey space and spaciousness rather than mere surface—and this is what I have been realizing with greater and greater force these past several months—you have to be out there, in person, en plain air, facing out into all that space,” Hockney told Lawrence Weschler, who contributes an essay to the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition.

The woods are a mixture of constancy and change. Among the constants, besides the paths themselves, are the thick tree trunk on the left side of the paintings and a slenderer tree trunk to the right that rises exactly at the merger point of two of the panels, which may have served as an orienting device for Hockney. But the woods themselves change slightly as the occasional branch breaks off during the nine-month period (early spring to late fall) represented by the paintings or branches hang lower because of the weight of their leaves.

Hockney, too, makes small changes, whether intentionally or unintentionally. A particular tree is omitted or the branches change their configuration. Presumably it was not the exact details Hockney was intent on, but the overall impression of the scene.

The primary changes, however, are in the light and colors. Not surprisingly for England, only two of the paintings depict direct sunlight, probably in the late afternoon, one time streaming from behind the painter’s right, the other from behind his left, casting long shadows across the ground.

Viewed up close the paintings turn out to use large brushstrokes, as if Hockney were in a hurry to catch the impressions of light and shadow before they altered, as was probably the case. But again, viewed from a distance, the paintings seem remarkably detailed and precise.

The 10th painting, a smaller one-panel piece, is an attractive autumn scene that reproduces a narrower view of the same vista. The trees in the background are turning fall colors. It is interesting to contrast what Hockney paints when viewing the scene directly with what he paints from memory. Details fade and familiar elements are repositioned. But it is still recognizably the same scene.

In these paintings, Hockney sees himself as working in the tradition of earlier English landscape painter John Constable (1776-1837):

“I’ve been looking at Constable recently,” Hockney told Weschler. “He was after all the first English painter to engage the English landscape in an authentic manner. …Constable is clearly out traipsing through the Suffolk countryside—you can almost sense the mud on his boots.”

Clearly Hockney is no longer to be viewed as a pop artist, if he ever deserved that label, but has a fair bid to enter the tradition of great English painters.

“David Hockney: Looking at Woldgate Woods,” Arts Club of Chicago, 201 E. Ontario St., Open M-F, 11 a.m-6 p.m. On view through July 18. Admission is free, as is a copy of the catalogue with reproductions of the paintings.