English painter and photographer David Hockney depicts the resplendent beauty of California’s first national park in his print series The Yosemite Suite, currently on view at L.A. Louver. Hockney, a longtime technology enthusiast, crafted these stunning works using the “Brushes” app on his iPad over the course of several trips to the park in 2010 and 2011.
Hockney has always made a habit of adopting technology to aid his drawing process, buying his first 35mm camera in 1967. However, he was dissatisfied with static photography as it stood, stating, “Photography is all right if you don’t mind looking at world from the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops for a second.” To address this problem, Hockney experimented with “joiners” or chemically processed portrait and landscape photo collages in the early 1980s. He combined several different images taken from many different Neo-Cubist perspectives. L.A. Louver exhibited several of these joiners in the 1983 show New Work with a Camera. Hockney has also tried his hand at a multitude of gadgets over the years, including fax machines, photocopiers, and video cameras.
He debuted some of his first photocopier pieces in a 1986 exhibition at the gallery entitled Home Made Prints. Not unlike traditional printmaking techniques, Hockney separated the colors and ran each sheet of paper through the office-quality device multiple times. Two years later, the artist began printing with fax machines. Hockney delighted in the fact that they allowed him to easily send new works to friends and family around the world and referred to the tool in revolutionary terms as the “telephone for the deaf.” When Photoshop rose to prominence as the must-have photo-editing software program in the late 2000s, the draughtsman quickly incorporated it into his creative process. The speed and utility were large factors in this choice as he revealed, “it enables one to draw freely and fast with color.” This marks the first time Hockney started drawing directly on the computer. Several of these Photoshopped prints were on display in the 2009 L.A. Louver show Drawing in a Printing Machine.
The iPad quickly became a favorite tool of Hockney’s in the 2010s due to its ease and convenience. Now able to choose from a wide variety of shades and colors with no mess, he could make four or five drawings a day. In a 2009 interview, Hockney admitted, “It’s always there in my pocket. There’s no thrashing about, scrambling for the right color.” This advancement of his artistic process allowed him to draw en plein air easily and prompted a grand resurgence of landscape themes in his work over the past decade, as featured in the L.A. Louver exhibitions The Arrival of Spring (2014) and The Yosemite Suite (2016). David Hockney stands as a testament that art and technology are not at odds with one another and are actually two sides of the same coin. In a 2012 New York Times interview, the artist revealed that residents of his native Yorkshire always come up and tease him. ‘“They say, ‘We hear you’ve started drawing on your telephone.’” And I tell them, “Well, no actually, it’s just that occasionally, I speak on my sketch pad.”
David Hockney: The Yosemite Suite is on view until October 1, 2016.
IMAGES: (clockwise from the top) The Grand Canyon Looking North, Arizona, September 1982, photographic collage; Autumn Leaves, 2008, inkjet printed computer drawing on paper; The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty-eleven) - 25 March, 2011, iPad drawing printed on four sheets of paper, mounted on four sheets of Dibond; Yosemite II, October 16th 2011iPad drawing printed on four sheets of paper, mounted on four sheets of Dibond; Green Grey & Blue Plant, July 1986, 1986, color xerox