Hockney says hearing loss helped his painting

David Hockney’s hearing loss has helped to sharpen his painting, giving him an enhanced sense of space and perspective, he has said. The 80-year-old artist inherited his deafness from his father, Kenneth, who died in 1978. It has worsened over the past 40 years and he now wears powerful hearing aids. Speaking on Tuesday at a retrospective exhibition at the Pompidou centre in Paris, Hockney said that his deafness had helped him to gain other senses and that he was now working on reverse perspective paintings. “If you lose one sense, you gain other senses, and I feel I could see space clearer,” he said. “I put it down to the hearing loss” Hockney donated a large collection of his work to the Pompidou , including The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire. His depictions of wooded Yorkshire hills are among the best known works in contemporary art. Source:The Times