David Hockney: A Bigger Picture by Tim Barringer is a collection of essays about the work of painter and photographer, David Hockney, in conjunction with an exhibit at the Tate Museum. Each essay focuses on a different aspect of Hockey's long and varied career, though most are about his work in the last two decades when he returned to England and began applying lessons learned from his photographic collages and panoramas to large scale, plein air paintings.

Hockney is an artist whose work I was very familiar with as a child. He was living and working in Los Angeles at the time, and an uncle of mine was a fan of his work. He gave my grandmother a print of one of his collages — done with two or three dozen Polaroid photographs. The print hung in my grandmother's house for years and was something I saw on an almost daily basis.

It was actually my son who found this book at the library. He was drawn to it by Hockney's wide variety of artistic styles. Most recently he's explored born digital art, using Brushes on his iPad. It was an interesting, albeit somewhat surreal, experience to reconnect with an artist's work through my son's discovery. ( )