Jennifer Noxon

I've been pouring over a couple of art books, one borrowed, one from Santa. Friend and painter, Rosemary Leach heard me cooing about Jack Shadbolt the other day and lent me a retrospective book on his life and work. Find reassurance in his work somehow. His shapes, intensity, spacial sense, love of contrast and bold colour. His painterliness is inspiring.

The other book is Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters by David Hockney. This man keeps amazing me. In the last few years he's been studying the works of the great masters and has developed a thesis about how they approached drawing and painting over several hundreds of years.In Secret Knowledge he shares his ideas and backs them up with images - an art history lesson from a unique standpoint. So prolific - always keeps me guessing at what he'll bring to the world next.

Wrote a song about Hockney after seeing two of his shows in Paris, France in 1998. The first show was at the Picasso Museum and focused on how his work had been influenced by Picasso - absolutely stunning, lots of parallels - Picasso and David Hockney's work side by side, yum. The other show was at the Pompidou Centre and was more recent work - large paintings of the Grand Canyon and English countryside. Apparently he was grieving the loss of several close friends and found some comfort in the overwhelming magnificence of the canyon.