Reflections on The Hockney Falco Thesis and its relevance on Art and Visual Culture Education.
by Aimee Weintz Allen
August 27, 2023
In 2001, I became interest in the premise of David Hockney’s ground-breaking theory on art and optics, first presented in his book, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (2001, 2006). In which, Hockney asserts that the evolution of realism in Western art corresponds to the early use of optics. This use included lenses and simple ‘mirror-lenses,’ by such artists as van Eyck, Campin, Lotto, Caravaggio, Ingres and others. According to Hockney, such artist-engineers revolutionized image making in ways ever-more relevant today then when they first projected miraculous motion pictures for themselves.
What made Hockney's “hunch” so groundbreaking was that it is unapologetically born out of an arts-based research practice. Hockney’s is one rooted in drawing, painting, photography and cross-disciplinary collaboration with other experts from other fields. And from it, a ‘bigger picture’ emerged - for him, and ultimately the public at large.
Hockney’s hunch turned back the clock on the early adoption of optics by artists more than a quarter century. By considering how space and light were handled and applied in the past, he continues to shape our visual present and futures through his own work. Quite consequently, many leading art historians enthusiastically expressed skepticism at the time of Hockney’s presentation of ideas and still do today - while others, like me, have gone on to be transformed by it - and are now teaching it, as a successful case study for arts-based education.
Hockney’s philosophical pondering of light and it’s transmutation through optics stacks layers of knowledge, from spectacles to telescopes, the mirrorlens to the camera Lucida, the film camera to the computer, to portable devices, and so on, and always to his brain. Most of all, Hockney imagines artists using these tools - frequently and often - just as he does, unashamed and also a disciplined creative.
Hockney’s obsession with the adoption of optics by earlier artists ultimately lead him to collaborate with Dr. Charles M. Falco, University of Arizona Professor of Optics, Chair Condensed Matter Physics. A life-long photographer in his own right. Falco provided Hockney with the strategies, tools and calculations needed to effectively demonstrate the re-discovery of the ‘mirror lens.’
Their collaborative re-discovery of mirrors as lens, for artistic use specifically, illustrates how lenses deliver quick, accurate, relevant reference material for artists - i.e. the goods. That a simple shaving mirror can be applied as a lens, in order to project a bright, well-oriented, traceable image of a subject, was hardly understood or accepted in 2001. And between the economic advantage it would give an artist in combination to the sacred mystery of it all, one can imagine why it was kept on the down-low way back in 1525.
If we think of technology from this perspective - through this lens, so-to-speak - then I begin to wonder what ‘mirror-lenses’ exist right now? What remarkable technologies do only a few posses, and just how creatively are they using them?
For a full account of Hockney & Falco’s collaboration and its relevance for arts-based education and instruction, see Imaging Spaceland, The Hockney-Falco Thesis: An Arts-based Case Study of Interdisciplinary Inquiry, by Aimée Littlewood Allen (née Weintz), University of Arizona, ProQuest, 2007.