The Arrival of Spring in 2011
Hockney is making new work in anticipation of a large one-person exhibition set to open at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2012. In January he begins drawing, en plein air, the East Yorkshire landscape on the iPad, and soon realizes that he has an opportunity to make a series chronicling the change from winter to summer. All total he makes over 100 iPad drawings, and this ultimately leads to a gallery installation at the RA of one enormous oil painting on 32 canvases, 12 by 32 feet, shown with 51 of the iPad drawings printed on paper.
In this painting I wanted the sensation of very early spring, when the first leaves come out. They begin at the very bottom of the trees, and you don’t see very much of the branches. They seem to float. I loved that idea, and that’s what this painting is about. This was my subject: when the spring was beginning, not quite full, otherwise there’d be too many leaves. Above this painting, we’re going to put: The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven). That’s the theme of a whole room at the RA.
Drawing on the iPad
The more I got into the iPad, the more I realized what a fantastic medium it is for landscape. There are certain things that you can do very, very quickly using it. One is that you can establish a palette for any kind of light extremely rapidly. You might not be able to draw it completely, but you can rough-in the colors faster than with any other medium I’ve ever used .... Even in the winter you can capture the light .... You need a fast method to do that .... Then often I’d come back to the studio and work there because I could see the screen better. I’ve always assumed that Monet must have had a system like that, where he knew what to do when he was in front of the motif, then worked on the paintings back in the studio. He’d put enough things down, as I did, to develop.
Bigger Yosemite
In the summer, Hockney returns to the U.S. to again draw scenes in Yosemite, this time with the intention of printing the iPad drawings “very large.” He decides he will show them with the multi-canvas painting A Bigger Message (2010) in a single gallery at the RA that is all about “looking up.”
More multi-camera movies
Having edited an almost one-hour long nine-camera movie of a winter scene in 2010 showing the snow falling on the East Yorkshire woods, Hockney goes back to the same location to shoot the scene in spring, summer, and fall. He edits each nine-camera movie to just over four minutes and plans an installation on four surrounding walls called The Four Seasons, Woldgate Woods (Spring 2011, Summer 2010, Fall 2010, Winter 2010). He also [NESTED]creates an 18-camera movie called Seven Yorkshire Landscapes.
One hundred years ago cubism was invented, and these may be the first cubist movies.
Exhibitions
Solo
- Me Draw on iPad, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (Apr 8–Aug 28).
Group
- Shared Intelligence: American Painting and the Photograph, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM, USA (May 21–Sep 9); catalogue.
- Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture 1950–1970, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, USA (Oct 1, 2011–Feb 5, 2012), travels to Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (Mar 15–Jun 10); catalogue.
Publications
Publications
- David Hockney: Fleurs Fraîches—Dessins sur iPhone et iPad, Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent, Paris.
- David Hockney: Four Print Portfolios 1961-1977, Museum of Art Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea.
- A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney, by Martin Gayford, London: Thames & Hudson.
- David Hockney: My Yorkshire, by Marco Livingstone, London: Enitharmon Editions.
- Hockney: The Biography—Volume 1, 1937-1975, by Christopher Simon Sykes, London: Century.