David Hockney is an English painter born in 1937. He rose to prominence in the 1960s as one of the major artists in English Pop Art.
Hockney was born in the city of Bradford in England. After grammar school, he went to the Bradford College of Art, and then on to the Royal College of Art in London. He’s been a fixture in the international art world since the mid 1960s.
This summer, he will be turning 88. For the past dozen years or so, instead of painting using a brush and canvas, he’s used an iPad. I was skeptical when I first heard about him doing this back in 2012, but the results, even then, were striking, and he’s only gotten better at it. He now uses an app made especially for him by a software developer in Leeds, England. He carries his iPad with him everywhere, like a sketchbook, and one reason he says he likes it is because you can layer color upon color as many times as you want, which you certainly can’t do with watercolor or oils. He also explains that the secret to good painting on an iPad is to choose luminous subjects, because the screen itself is luminous.
Four years ago, he began painting a series of flowers in vases on tables against a monochromatic background. After a doing a couple, he decided to use glass vases which obviously conduct light in very different ways, and he found it very interesting and kept painting.
In the Salts Mill Gallery in Saltaire, England—a mill village built in Victorian times just northwest of his hometown—Hockney now has an exhibit up of 20 of these flower paintings. The gallery also has a multiscreen video installation that shows exactly how he builds up his paintings on the iPad stroke by stroke. “I think it’s incredibly generous to reveal your process that way,” says Zoe Silver, a curator at the gallery.
Also on display, is one of his signature large works that he created in 2022. It shows him in a chair, twice— once at each end of the piece —looking at a wall full of his flower pictures. It’s delightful, and quintessential Hockney.
He believes that anyone who likes drawing and painting will naturally want to explore new media in which to do it. If you happen to be in England any time soon, this would be a great show to see.
