After decades spent based in Los Angeles, his attention had begun to shift back towards the terrain of his youth. When the RA exhibition was first proposed, Hockney had already been working for several years in east Yorkshire, with increasing obsession and ambition. The sequence of works that will be seen in Gallery III is the culmination, to date, of Hockney’s love affair with the English countryside, specifically with a few quiet miles of the Yorkshire Wolds. They come out at the very bottom of the trees, and you don’t see very much of the branches. “I wanted the floating feeling of very early spring, when the first leaves appear. Above each will be the date on which it was drawn, and above a huge oil painting on the end wall will be the title The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven) – Woldgate being a road in the country outside Bridlington. I kept going back to the same places.” Eventually, he made 94 iPad drawings, from which he selected 51 for the RA exhibition. Grasses came up, the first campion flowers, buttercups, dandelions. "As the spring developed I realised that I had to move in closer because it was all about what was happening on the ground. I had begun drawing the changing scene on the iPad in the New Year, then, when I’d printed out five or six iPad drawings on a big scale, I began to realise, my God, you could do the whole room with this method. “We got marvellous snow, the spring was early and we were ready for everything. “In 2011 there was a wonderful spring, and I had planned to record it,” he explains. The paradox of East Yorkshire, as Hockney points out, is that, though the landscape is essentially unchanging, its weather is very changeable, altering the light and colour as the clouds pass overhead and the sun shifts position. And speed counts with open-air landscape art. The iPad is faster than watercolour, in which washes have to dry, or even coloured pencils. He wouldn’t finish the drawing at this lightning rate but he could very rapidly fix some crucial relationships. There are certain things that you can do very, very quickly using it.” In two seconds, Hockney found, he could establish the basic colour and tone of a sky, and put in some faint clouds in three seconds. “The more I got into the iPad, the more I realised what a fantastic medium it is for landscape. Then he decided to fill the biggest gallery in his show with iPad drawings. Towards the end of the year, he began to print them out on a larger scale than the iPad screen. In early 2010, when the iPad was launched, Hockney quickly moved up to this larger tablet computer, and the prolific production of digitally-aided drawings continued: flowers, landscapes, still-life subjects. And my flowers last.” He also used this new medium to depict objects – a candle, for example, and a lamp – that, like the iPhone, glow with light. “I draw flowers every day,” he said at the time, “and I send them to my friends, so they get fresh blooms every morning. The iPhone drawings were usually of what Hockney could see from his bed – the view through his window, the shutters, the bouquets that Hockney’s partner John put on the window sill. These images were tiny, loose, free and often ravishing. That year, he started sending a stream of images to the phones and email inboxes of his friends almost on a daily basis. In the winter of 2008-09, he bought an iPhone, and began to draw on it with his thumb, using an app called Brushes. It’s a fantastic opportunity, and I think I’ve responded to it.” “That’s what they were made for, that’s how the lighting was designed. “These are some of the best rooms in London to hang very grand paintings,” he says. It is a more unusual, indeed unprecedented, affair.Īlmost the entire space of the main galleries at Burlington House will be filled with recent work by the 74-year-old artist: much of it made within the past four years, a good deal in the past 12 months. Of course, Hockney has been an enormously prolific and celebrated painter for half a century, and much of his earlier work – the cool images of Californian life from the mid-1960s, the grandly naturalistic portraits of the late 60s and early 70s, the photo-collages of the 80s – has already passed into the art history books. Although a few earlier works are included to provide context, essentially this is the opposite of a career overview. From the Winter 2011 issue of RA Magazine, issued quarterly to Friends of the RA.ĭavid Hockney RA declares, “The great thing to say is that this is not a retrospective.” He is talking about his forthcoming exhibition at the Royal Academy, A Bigger Picture, and he is absolutely correct.
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