Hockney / Sefton Park / Tate Liverpool

To Saltaire to view some of Hockney's work.
What always strikes me is how full of life his work is.

• drawing skills are manifest with much energy in line and cross hatching
• inveterate experimenter, embracing latest technology- currently doing flower piantings every morning on his ipad and sending them to his friends so they have fresh flowers every day!
• disappointingly his latest very large Bridlington tree paintings were not being shown
• colour being pushed more and more in his landscape work- strong purples, blues, oranges giving a very vibrant palette.

Sefton Park, Liverpool
Interested as the renovation of historic parks was one of the specialist areas I engaged with when practicing as a landscape architect.
Park design result of a competition which was on by a Frenchman, Edouard Andre, who worked in conjunction with a Liverpool architect, exhibits most of the classic elements of a late C19 park (opened in1872):

• Enclosing woodlands, large areas of grassland, serpentine pathways, satatuary, bowls, tennis water features and a superb Palm house .

How could these 'classic park elements'  be expressed in paint without being directly descriptive?
Texture is a key component and widely  expressed:

•  fine textured grass /course grasses/ clipped box and yew. Course holly providing a dark and occasionally reflective background
• gravel /smooth marble/ stone with lichen patina

Water, textureless- reflective

Colour
This, of course, is dynamic and changes during the day and the season. Seasons, I am sure, have been done to death but could form an interesting series of paintings and would get me slightly closer to my goal of addressing 'time in the landscape'

Compositional posibilities:

• Series of vertical coloured bands, taken directly from the palette of the park
• Possible basis for determinig width of bands - based on approx proportion of the particular element in the park e.g grass say 60% woodland 15% paths 5% other elements constituting the balance -maybe too restrictive but proivides a rationale. Probably need to add a notional quantity for 'sky' as this is an integral part of the landscape exxperience.
• If go along the seasonal route some colour shifts would be quite marked while others more or less a constant - e.g lime leaves going  from young sap green through to strong chrome/ cadmium yellow whereas yew/ holly remain as a constant. Therefore band widths in each painting would remain a constant but some of the colours would change.
• Does it have to be 'the four seasons'? (Alarums / enter bear stage right / Vivaldi)
• Square format canvass as 'record' rather than landscape statement, however the eye would read the paintings together in 'one landscape sweep'