'Looking at the world from the point of view of...

 a paralysed Cyclops – for  split second'
 
That’s David Hockney on photography. Today at his Tate Britain retrospective we saw his solution – breaking a scene into dozens of rectangles, taking a photograph of each small section then assembling them to (re)make a whole picture. The result is an image in which there are multiple viewpoints and the subject seems to move. I was entranced. He started doing it with polaroids, so at least he could see what he’d done as he went along, but he didn’t like the white borders so he changed to 35mm film. Methodical, meticulous, painstaking, extraordinary.
 
It’s so interesting to see the development of a curious, creative artist over a long time as he tries new techniques and ideas but probably the biggest insight for me was watching his ipad drawings/paintings. Not just the finished image but the whole process was recorded and shown, and we watched an outline appear, some colour, a detail. We saw some parts painted over and reworked, the light being changed on clothing, the line of a floor moved, a head tilted differently, a picture emerge. For someone who knows nothing about how to paint or draw it was utterly magical.
 
So this is two split seconds in different bits of London from one paralysed Cyclops.