'I really enjoy looking… If you look at the world, it’s very beautiful. But you’ve got to have a clear head and there’s lots of things that stop you looking.' —David Hockney
Like millions of people around the world, the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent lockdowns confined David Hockney to his home for long stretches of 2020. During this time, Hockney had to seek out artistic inspiration within a much-limited radius: his house and garden in Normandy, Northern France. In My Normandy – a body of work that includes the iPad drawings A Bigger Fire and No Fire – Hockney responds to his immediate surroundings. Using lockdown as an opportunity to really contemplate what he was seeing, Hockney transformed his everyday views into highly personal artworks.
In both A Bigger Fire and No Fire, Hockney focuses on his own hearth. Traditionally viewed as the centre of domesticity through its association with warmth and cooking, the roaring fireplace in A Bigger Fire is comforting and homely. Supplementary details such as the bellows lying to the left of the foreground and the small brush hanging from the mantel add elements of personalisation, further emphasising that this is an inhabited and frequently used space. Even in No Fire, where Hockney chooses to depict an empty fireplace – a subject that would usually be overlooked - the subtle differentiations in colour and line, which the artist utilises to reveal the textures of the stone on the back wall, speak to a long period of visual engagement with his subject.
Viewed together, A Bigger Fire and No Fire speak of the inevitable passing of time - a concept that became more poignant in Hockney’s work over lockdown, as COVID-19 seemed to halt life as we knew it. Other projects he completed in lockdown - such as A Year in Normandy and The Arrival of Spring, Normandy – focus on the progression of time through the examination of familiar subjects. A Bigger Fire and No Fire are domestic equivalents: they evoke a mental image of Hockney seated in front of his hearth, repeatedly studying the scene in front of him and the effect of time passing.
