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David Hockney is one of the UK’s greatest living artists. For decades, he’s been producing beautiful, colourful, genre-defining paintings. You know them, you’ve seen them, they’re on posters, tea towels and T-shirts. They’re amazing.
And a few years ago, he started experimenting with drawing using an app on his iPad. And he liked the results, so he showed them in all his exhibitions. And every time he did, people would go ‘urgh, horrible, stick to *real* paintbrushes, Dave’ or say things like ‘I could do that’, as one Time Out staffer did.
Well, Laura, no you couldn’t, because big Dave’s iPad images are actually damn good. The ultra-crisp colours and crystalline definition lend themselves perfectly to his aesthetic approach to painting.
And more than anything, it’s amazing that even using an iPad, his works still look uniquely like Hockneys. And it’s not just me who thinks they’re great, the Royal Academy agrees too, because it’s just announced an exhibition of his lockdown iPad drawings for 2021. Yeah, while we were all trying to justify daily 4pm gin and tonics and refusing to get off the couch, our boy Davey was bloody painting on his iPad and then getting a whole show at the RA out of it.
'David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020' will be at the Royal Academy of Arts from Mar 27-Aug 22 2021.
Can’t wait? Here are the best shows you can see in London right now.
Find out about Ryoji Ikeda, another tech-inspired artist who’s exhibiting in London soon.