David Hockney, a naive artist

Posted by Tanos on Thu 2 Apr 09, 11:58 PM

Tags: forestry

Last week David Hockney, an art establishment figure in Britain, kicked up a stink in the Guardian about the felling of some beech trees. I must admit being quite incensed when I read it - since Hockney not just paints in a naive style, but seems to think in it too

Hockney has been visiting the small roadside wood in question for a couple of years, taking photographs and preparing to do four seasonal paintings. He's done summer and winter, but when he went back last Wednesday (25th March), they'd been felled. As he'd not told the owners what he was planning, that was the first he knew of it.

Hockney's emotive language ("It was like coming into some little village or town and finding that overnight the people had obliterated a great church that had stood there for 900 years.") stirred up a bunch of impassioned responses from (urban?) readers of the Guardian, talking about it being criminal etc etc.

But now Gabriel Hemery and Nick Gibbs of the Sylva Foundation have written a reply, pointing out that these kinds of 19th and 20th century woods were planted to be felled for the timber ... and replanted. Nowadays, felling requires a license, and replanting will be a condition of that license.

They also asked, rather pointedly, where exactly Mr Hockney thinks the wood for his paint brushes comes from, if not from felling?

If we don't allow landowners to manage woodlands commercially, they won't be managed, and then we get monocultures with very little wildlife. Beech is particularly good at starving out almost all other species and then growing up 30m so you're walking through a "dead" forest of trunks and leaf litter. If this "copse" is genuinely returned to coppice, or even just replanted, it will provide a much broader habitat for flowers, shrubs, insects, birds and mammals. That has to be better than the forestry equivalent of a wheat field.

Edited Fri 3 Apr 09, 12:09 AM by Tanos

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