Hockney’s exploration of technology dates back to the 1980s, when he created a groundbreaking body of shifting Polaroid photocollages, a series of which were exhibited at Richard Gray Gallery  in 1983. His interest in technology only accelerated as he experimented with other mass-use equipment, including Xeroxes, the fax machine, Macintosh computers, and Photoshop. 

This early digital fluency led him to embrace the possibilities of working on the iPhone and iPad upon their release in the late 2000s. Working with Brushes and other applications developed for drawing on touchscreens, Hockney began to draw hundreds of images on his iPhone in 2009 and then in 2010 on the iPad, which allowed him to work at a larger scale and with more detail.

Keeping a tablet on his bedside, he developed a ritual-like habit of making numerous digital paintings, often intimate in focus and impromptu in feel, of everyday life.

Throughout 2019 and the quarantine days of 2020, Hockney has endeavored to remain as positive and productive as ever with this daily sketching, depicting the quotidian items around his studio and fresh flowers with deft finger strokes on the iPad, and then emailing the images out to friends and family.

As Gray Principal Valerie Carberry noted in a recent Art Basel interview, Hockney’s drawing on the iPad aren’t merely using the technology but in fact evocative of the digital substrate itself, translating “the electricity of looking at a screen, the brightness and intensity of all the color.” [iii]  

In a time dominated by the digital, Hockney continues to find methods of drawing out moments of observational clarity and levity, even in the dimmest of days.

Yet Hockney’s landscapes are not so simply about space itself as they are about how he moves, meditatively, observantly, through it. In Yorkshire in 2010, Hockney saw his childhood environment anew through creating his Four Seasons videos, a nine-channel film tracking slowly through the Woldgate Woods, which featured in Hockney’s 2018 exhibition at Gray Warehouse. Writing in Tate’s David Hockney catalogue, Meredith A. Brown notes the piece as “a complex vision of the English countryside as a landscape experienced, not simply seen.”[vi]

Now in Normandy and back to paint and paper, Hockney nevertheless insists on creating the character of place and the illusion of movement through multiple views that guide the viewer through views from each cardinal direction.

Hockney’s shifting  perspective is further developed in Beuvron-en-Auge Panorama, 2019, a sloping, almost topographical view of the nearby, two-hundred person village of Beuvron-en-Auge.

For critic Jackie Wullschläger, “His stage sets come to mind in the eight-foot painting Beuvron-en-Auge, Panorama, depicting his nearest village, houses around a market square tilted as a sort of oval cut-out.” [viii]

Though years have passed since he produced backgrounds and sets operas, the theatricality and fantasy of Hockney’s landscapes remain unabashed.

The development of this dramatic sense of space finds its way to the forefront of Hockney’s ink drawings, with even the curtains delineating the stage on which the white and brown-spotted Ruby prances. In effect, each composition draws together many of Hockney’s subjects and styles developed throughout his long career: the multiple planes of view dating back to his 1960s works; the high drama of his designs for stage and opera sets in the 1970s and 80s; the colorful gridded layers and abstract forms of his 1990s; and the focus on the natural of so many of his works in the last two decades. 

Even today with only his dog and his closest circle of assistants in the audience, Hockney remains ever enthralled by the artist’s simple joy of wrestling with vision.

Hockney has received a vast number of awards and honors, including in 1997 his recognition as a Companion of Honour from the British and Commonwealth Order for his outstanding achievement in the arts.

David Hockney’s work can be found in numerous distinguished public collections around the world, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Portrait Gallery, London; The Tate Gallery, London; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.