David Hockney takes on the iPad

David Hockney is perhaps best know for his contributions to the British pop art movement of the 1960’s. The artist is the art world’s version of “art royalty”… always playing by his own rules and sticking to his gut. So it should be no surprise that the 85-year-old British artist tackled “art on technology” with the enthusiasm of a young child on Christmas morning.

Like many things that occurred due to or because of the pandemic, Hockney sought out beauty and color. As such, in March 2020, the artist traveled to Normandy to capture spring’s slow arrival.

Throughout the pandemic, Hockney would occasionally share his new paintings in an effort to spread hope to those struggling with anxiety and stress. The artist worked tirelessly to create positive images of beautiful scenery while isolating in the French countryside. Specifically, Hockney, along with his assistant Jonathan Wilkinson and friend J.P., hunkered down in a house in the middle of a four-acre field full of mature fruit trees. The lack of interpersonal stimulation forced Hockney to concentrate on drawing.

Hockney says that he finished at least one drawing a day to document the constant changes outside. As the drawings began to accumulate, the team printed them out and started to hang them up throughout the studio. He told Royal Academy, “I kept drawing the winter trees, and then the small buds that became the blossom, and then the full blossom. Then the leaves started, and eventually the blossom fell off, leaving a small fruit and leaves. This process took about two weeks, and all the time I was getting better at my mark making on the screen.”

What started out as drawing winter trees, then morphed into trees with small buds that then began to blossom and finally, the trees in full bloom. That metamorphosis turned into leaves emerging, blossoms falling off, and small fruit forming. All in all, Hockney captured this transition over the course of two weeks

Hockney confirms that with the iPad, the picture becomes your palette which means that he could pick a color of his choosing. Clearly with this new medium, there are pros and cons. The artist attests in regards to one of the minuses, “drawing on a glass surface, that he [Jonathan] suggested we get a thin film that lays on the surface and offers a resistance like paper.” Hockney believed this was actually an improvement. When sitting outside the house, with all the lights turned off, the moonlight was more clear. “The moon could then be seen to cast shadows of the trees on the grass, so with my backlit iPad I could draw it. This would have been virtually impossible without it.”

Hockney calls his new work “photographic drawing.” At the beginning of the pandemic, before any of us knew what was really going on, the artist produced more than 100 new works on his iPad. Among his subject matter were sunsets, fruit trees, moonlight, and rippling water. Each one of the works was something Hockney observed in person around his old, wood-beam French farmhouse. He said (courtesy of Country Life), “I can’t stop actually. Everywhere I look, there’s something.”

For Hockney… it’s always been “more is more.” In essence, he says that the more he looks at his surroundings, the more he sees within them. The point is clear, even in an everyday, mundane setting, you can find interesting aspects; it just depends on “how intensely you look at it and how much you think and feel about it.”

Last year, the Art Institute of Chicago was the first American institution to showcase Hockney’s newest creations. Titled “David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020,” the show was organized in conjunction with the Royal Academy of Arts, London. The unusual exhibition was curated by Edith Devaney, formerly from the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and includes each of the 116 works drawn for the series.

Who knows where this will lead. One thing is certain… this was a wonderful precursor to Hockey’s current London retrospective called, “Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away).” At an age when most artists would be slowing down, Hockney is a fabulous example to us all to keeping doing what we love, no matter the obstacles that might come our way!