David Hockney

The present iPad drawings are from the series of 49 works of this scale from David Hockney’s celebrated Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 series. One of the artist’s most vibrant and ambitious explorations of landscape, perception, and technological possibility, the series comprises dozens of images, each documenting subtle shifts in color, light and atmosphere. Instead of presenting a single, authoritative view of spring, Hockney constructs a visual diary of its progress by returning repeatedly to the same stretch of Woldgate and showing the landscape as something experienced over time rather than frozen in an instant.

Hockney’s adoption of digital media was essential to capturing the rapidly changing landscape. The iPad allowed him to work directly from observation with unprecedented speed, layering and revising the same image without needing to start anew. Hockney has always pushed the boundaries of using new technology in his work and his interest in the present medium dates to 2009, when he began to sketch on his iPhone. Subsequently anyone visiting the artist in Bridlington – then his center of operations – would hear him extol the virtues and possibilities of the device as a tool for drawing.

In process, subject and execution, the series is innovative in every way. Although depicting spring is a time-honored tradition in European art, no artist has ever observed it so closely, with such fascinated and loving attention, nor recorded it in such detail as an evolving process. Viewed either individually or as a whole, the works in the series are a testament to Hockney’s ability to expose the beauty and nuance of the mundane.