Big Dave’s been getting right up people’s noses lately. Just last week, our most celebrated living painter designed possibly the most slapdash roundel ever for Piccadilly Circus, a knowingly naive bit of super colourful playfulness done on an iPad, and people were livid. Now, he’s opened a whole show of iPad paintings at the Royal Academy. 83 years old, and absolutely hellbent on trolling everyone who has ever liked his art.
Well, not me, pal, because I absolutely love this way-too-big exhibition of landscapes, still lifes and nature studies. Started in only November last year, these canvases find old Hockers depicting the changing of the seasons in Normandy through lockdown. There are huge sweeping green vistas swaddled in dark clouds, deep orange winter sunsets, bright yellow daffodils, little still lifes, quaint little garden compositions, all filled with digital brush marks and pixelated artefacts. It’s lovely, calming art.
And Hockney’s use of iPad technology is genuinely clever. Over the years, he’s adapted it to his means, pushed it until it moulds to his intentions. He’s made the medium his own. You could even imagine these paintings coming out of the post-internet art explosion of the 2010s.
And it doesn’t even matter that these are done on an iPad, they’re just an extension of everything else he’s ever done, and every work here looks unmistakably like a Hockney.
That these have works have also put the shits up a whole bunch of art snobs only makes them better. Sure, there’s a part of me that feels like putting on yet another Hockney show at the RA feels a bit cynical, but it's been a tough year, so you can’t begrudge them the ticket sales.
Instead, just go and let your eyes be tickled by a brilliant artist exploring his joyous, unstoppable creativity. After a year of grim, grey isolation, all this lush green feels like the world springing back to life all across the walls of the Royal Academy.
Book tickets here.
