Anyone who has helped older relatives come to grips with mobile devices and apps will approach David Hockney’s new exhibition with a sense of wonder before they even see the paintings. The 84-year-old artist produced everything in his new show, The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020 on an iPad, working at speed.
To be fair, the British-born artist is a long way from your average octogenarian. He is probably the world’s best-known modern painter, producing steadily since the 1960s, and holds the record for the most expensive work ever sold by a living artist. He’s had an interest in innovative tools and technology his whole career, from the high-tech acrylics he used in his early works to initial explorations of the drawing power of computers in the mid ‘80s. His iPad has been a favourite canvas for at least a decade now, and he has become so associated with it that app developers work with him to create new brush styles and functionality.
This show is special not because of the technology but because of its circumstances. Hockney was visiting a house he owns in Normandy early in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic spread across Europe. He ended up locked in there. While most of us binge-watched Netflix and overindulged on comfort food and alcohol, Hockney saw a chance to do something special with his art. He created a new painting every day in his garden, returning to subjects as the world progressed from stark winter to glorious spring.
He’s taken a page out of Monet’s book, fitting since the impressionist painter’s famous garden is not far from Hockney‘s Norman place. Looking at 2020’s progressions of an apple tree, the sunrise over distant hills or the same stand of poplars, you’ll immediately think of Monet’s repetition of haystacks or water lilies, and have the same joys of comparing and contrasting. Also in common with the Impressionists is the way these paintings look radically different from up close and far away. In close proximity, you will marvel at the composition, the brushstrokes, and the way simple, repetitive techniques coalesce to create an object. Look back from across the room and all the detail fades into a spectacularly beautiful picture.
Most of all, however, these paintings will just make you happy. Hockney‘s colour palette is as joyous as the season he is representing. The three exhibition rooms are bright, cheerful, and full of hope. As every gardener knows instinctively, spring is a time of unbridled joy and possibility, when everything bursts fresh from the ground and all the colours seem more intense after the gloom of winter. The 116 paintings hung here capture that perfectly, starting with bare branches in a stark landscape and taking us through the to full, lush greenery of early summer. Trees blossom. Buds pop. Daffodils dance. Leaves creep over a treehouse. Gentle spring rain makes fairy circles on the pond.
These paintings are deceptive. At first glance, many of them seem remarkably simple; large blocks of colour, single trees, basic shapes. You might dismiss them as graphic design or illustration. But the longer you look, the more complex they become. In fact, there are no solid colours. The green of a lawn is layers of subtly different brushstrokes and colours to give that sense of life and variety between blades of grass. A spill of white blossom is a careful construction of minute dots and dashes of whites, pinks and greens. Skies are a fabulous riot of much more than blue.
Hockney is a master of light. From the watery, weak sun glimmering through bare branches, to the sharp, crisp light of a spring morning to the low spotlights of late afternoon falling across bushes, you can feel the earth moving the sun ever higher. When fog dispels that light, he blurs every edge and surface to create such a perfect atmosphere you can almost feel gentle mist on your skin. Night skies perfectly capture the reflections of a bright moon against drifting clouds
The show is hung in chronological order, allowing you to walk through the developing season. You will then want to go back to find the repetition of the different subjects and compare and contrast. The catalogue, reasonably priced (as exhibition catalogues go) at £25 focuses more on the objects painted as a series. I snapped it up, not just for the smile it will put on my face every time I flip through it, but to study his techniques in colour and layering as I try to get better at drawing and painting.
I can answer this last one. You still need to see it in person. It is a matter of size. Most of these paintings are quite large… they would overwhelm any room in a typical family home. Seeing them at this size drives home the magic of the variation between up close and the long view. Being surrounded by a dense hang of them is like being enveloped in colour and delight. My body might have been in the Royal Academy in late August, but my soul was in Normandy in the spring.
It’s a delicious irony that art created by a forced incarceration has allowed all who look at it to travel in time and distance. And in a time when the word is so full of worry, it’s a potent and much-needed medicine to see something that inspires such pure joy.
The Arrival of Spring is on at the Royal Academy until 26 September. At posting, there was limited availability, mostly on weekdays, with Sunday the 19th and 26th the only weekend dates left.
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