How to Push Beyond the Frame Like David Hockney
- Jul 28
- 3 min read
Updated: Aug 7
"Photography is all right if you don't mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralysed Cyclops, for a split second. But that's not what it's like to live in the world." - David Hockney
Pioneering artist David Hockney viewed the world inside and outside of frames. A canvas is a frame. A photograph is a frame. Your field of vision is a frame.
Hockney seemed to see every frame as a limitation and an opportunity. I think we can learn a lot from his perspective.
His criticism of photography didn't come from disdain for the medium. He often used photographs as direct reference for his paintings. He stitched hundreds of them together into collages. Photography was a tool and a valid medium for him.
The real target was the limits of any single way of seeing. Filter the world through any medium and you compromise something about reality.
I think that's why so much of his work carries a sense of unreality. Moments frozen in time. Places flattened into still planes. The frame is visible in the work, not hidden by it.
And once you see that, his career is a journey of alternately embracing and rejecting the frames we impose on ourselves.
When the single photograph felt too still, he made his joiners, dozens of prints assembled into one image from multiple viewpoints, closer to how looking actually feels.
When delivering art was too slow, he sent drawings as faxes to be printed on the other side of the world.
When the iPhone appeared, he started drawing on it, sending sketches of flowers and sunrises to friends. The iPad followed, resulting in a huge body of digital works.
Then the frames grew. The iPad drawings became vast prints, then projections filling entire rooms. Work you could step inside, wander around, and immerse yourself in.
That last frame is everywhere now. Immersive experiences have boomed across arts and entertainment. But notice what's happening: the format that aims to dissolve the frame is becoming the new frame. The default perspective. The standardised approach.
Future ways of representing the world, and of giving people genuinely fresh perspectives, won't come from doing more inside the formats we already recognise. They'll come from whoever finds the edges of the current one.
Which is exactly why Hockney is a useful example in our digital, interactive, and immersive worlds.
What resonates for me isn't any one format he picked up. It's the restlessness. It's easy to accept the mediums we've inherited as the way things have always been and always will be.
But his practice was to question the forms themselves. To find the edges of whatever frame he was handed, bring its limitations into the light, and push the canvas wider.
Future ways of representing the world, and of giving people genuinely fresh perspectives, won't come from doing more inside the formats we already recognise. They'll come from whoever finds the edges of the current one.
So, some questions worth asking yourself in everything you’re designing and building: what frames are we inside right now? What has become so familiar we've stopped seeing it at all? What’s beyond the edges of the frame, just out of reach?
Green Raven brings strategic realism to cultural organisations and creative tech studios working in digital, interactive, and immersive formats.
Reframe is a fast, fixed-price sprint to find the edges of your project, reposition it, and refine it for your audiences. Check out the Services page for more info.
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