David Hockney exhibition

I visited David Hockney's exhibition, "A Bigger Picture", at the Royal Academy in London recently. The exhibition documents his work in landscape painting over his lifetime and I found it very inspiring, particularly in terms of his use of colour, the scale of his work, and the way he has embraced and experimented with new technologies.

As a keen digital artist, I found it very encouraging to see his use of the iPad and the iPhone as another art medium. I really enjoyed seeing how he had used this medium and how it had influenced and become intertwined with his traditional work.

This is an iPad painting from Hockney's "Arrival of Spring" series. He painted the same area 51 times using his iPad to track and document the changes in the scenery as spring arrived in Yorkshire. One of the advantages of the iPad was the immediacy and portability of the medium. The paintings form a beautiful visual journey:

The next two images are views of the "Arrival of Spring" iPad painting gallery to give an idea of scale:

This is a large oil painting (approx 10m by 4m) which was the culmination of his iPad "Arrival of Spring" work. The colour and scale were magnificent!

This iPad painting is of a view in Yosemite National Park. I loved the sense of depth and distance Hockney captured in this work. I was also impressed with the clarity and size of the scale up from an iPad screen.