We had a good country walk today around the North Yorkshire village of Carlton Husthwaite, which is an area we know very little about. I was amazed, walking along a lane at the start of the walk, to see so many, and so many species, of butterflies. My knowledge of these is rather limited, so I was far from being able to identify them all, particularly since butterflies never seem to sit still long enough for you to get a good look at them. It was, however, a magical experience. Toward the end of the walk I was surprised to encounter a barn owl …. in broad daylight. The weather was baking hot, and we were both immensely relieved to get back to The Plump Partridge (the local pub) at the end of the day.
I was particularly struck by a remark of my wife, as we set out on the walk. She said that it was a real David Hockney scene …. referring to his well-known series of watercolour paintings of that area. The colours were exactly those which typify the series, and in particular she observed that the clouds were definitely “hockneyesque”. David Hockney is well known for his insistence that the task of the artist is to observe closely and to see more clearly than the rest off us. It struck me, however, that the process of seeing has been taken by artists one stage further. Influenced by their work we have come to see the world through their eyes. We see North Yorkshire through the eyes of David Hockney. It is no longer possible, moreover, for us to see sunflowers except through the eyes of Vincent Van Gogh, waterlilies except through the eyes of Claude Monet, or Lakeland landscapes except through the eyes of William Heaton-Cooper. Certainly artists enable us to see things in the world we had never noticed before. The trouble is, however, that we find great difficulty in escaping from “the artistic gaze” and seeing the world for ourselves.