David Hockney
(2009) 

Hockney had been using an iPhone since 2007, mostly for texting, but his sister Margaret told him about a new app called Brushes. Hockney is entranced and soon masters it. Friends around the world begin receiving new works of art from Hockney’s iPhone.

Between 2009 and 2010, David Hockney revolutionized digital art practice by embracing the iPhone as a legitimate artistic medium, creating an extraordinary body of work that would fundamentally challenge traditional notions of artmaking. Works such as Glass, My Bedroom Window, Flame, Lilies, Early Morning, and White Rose demonstrate Hockney's remarkable ability to transform everyday technology into vehicles for sophisticated artistic expression. Executed using the Brushes app, these drawings represent more than mere technological experimentation—they constitute a serious investigation into light, color, and perception through an entirely new lens. The immediacy of the iPhone allowed Hockney to capture fleeting moments with unprecedented spontaneity, often creating works directly upon waking or in response to his immediate surroundings.
https://guyhepner.com/david-hockney/iphone-drawings


This iPhone drawing shows a vase of bright peonies in the foreground placed on a windowsill, with the pace of Hockney's brushstrokes appearing to match the vibrant flowers. The My Window series documents the process of the changing seasons as Spring arrives and as we can see, these flowers bloom.

Peonies No 535 iPhone Drawing from My Window
iPhone drawing printed as an eight colour inkjet print on cotton fibre archival paper.
56 x 43.4 cm.
2009.
Edition of 250.
Drawn on 28 June 2009 as part of the My Window series.
With accompanying My Window Art Edition book and portfolio.
https://www.cliftongallery.com/product-page/david-hockney-peonies-untitled-535

David Hockney
(2011) 
 

In 2011, David Hockney unveiled a monumental series of digital paintings that captured the fleeting beauty of a Yorkshire spring. Titled The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011, this collection represents a pivotal moment in contemporary art, blending traditional landscape sensibilities with cutting-edge technology. 
The Arrival of Spring comprises 52 parts, including 51 iPad drawings in which Hockney captured the changing nature along different sections of the road, and his largest painting: "The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty-eleven)," a nearly ten-meter-long painting composed of 32 canvases (each 91.4 x 121.9 cm). It depicts a forest in vibrant colors. The leaves appear to be flying, and a path leads into the burgeoning greenery at the center. The painting technique is understated, adapted to the possibilities of the iPad drawings. David Hockney suggests depth through the blue-green, blurred forests in the background, while in the foreground, the vegetation on the ground is rendered in a patterned and seemingly more detailed manner. Everything is highly stylized and is reminiscent of the decorative tradition of early 20th-century French painting – Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Henri Rousseau, Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse would be examples (→ Matisse – Bonnard).

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13256057-david-hockney

The arrival of Spring Woldgate Woods
2011
Oil on 32 canvases 
91 x 122 cm (each) 365 x 975 cm overall
Centre Pompidou, Paris
https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/media/BWaINat

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13256057-david-hockney 

 

 David Hockney
(2008) 
 

 Three Trees Near Thixendale, Spring 2008 is one of four pieces that David Hockney painted from the same spot during the winter and summer of 2007, and the spring and autumn of 2008. No matter which picture you observe you cannot fail to be impressed with his vivid colours. Spring's here again, the winter has surrendered to the new beginnings found in a springtime lansdacpe, but spring passes into summer and you are all too acutely aware of it here. The emerging wildflowers and foliage coming into leaf recall the ghosts of the seasons past and remind us that with their emerging they too will die in the cycle of the seasons. All things must pass.
Paul Page, 2012

Three Trees Near Thixendale, Spring
2008
Oil on 8 canvases 
91.5 x 122 each  (183 x 244 overall)
Private collection
https://www.thedavidhockneyfoundation.org/artwork/2472

David Hockney
(2010) 

 

David Hockney’s Woldgate Woods, Winter, 2010 is a dazzling continuation of the artist’s career-consuming project to better see the world around him. Filmed as part of a yearlong immersion in the landscape of the Yorkshire Wolds, this exquisite, sunbathed snowscape takes the viewer on a cinematic pilgrimage of sight. Against a clear blue sky a thick blanket of snow carpets the ground and encrusts the canopied branches of the trees. In places sun floods the frame, hanging low and out of sight, and casting long, dramatic shadows across the woodland floor as tones of cool, pale blue give way to shimmering bright whites. Part of a seasonal quartet documenting the effects of light and time on place, the film combines archetypal themes of Hockney’s practice with his insatiable pursuit of new technologies. 
Woldgate Woods, Winter, 2010 has been exhibited in numerous surveys of the artist’s work, including the major travelling retrospective David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, which opened at the Royal Academy, London in 2012.

Woldgate Woods, Winter, 
2010
Nine synchronised digital videos
overall: 206 x 362cm.
Executed in 2010, this work is number seven from an edition of ten plus two artist's proofs
Private collection (sold at Christie’s 5Mar 2025)
https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6523681
https://www.thedavidhockneyfoundation.org/chronology/2010
https://youtu.be/SMjvI5aa9TE?si=aHQj-V4ws_LG9k_i

 <b>David Hockney</b>

(2009) 

 

 Writing in The Guardian, Adrian Searle spoke of the next landscape as having ‘an almost surreal and visionary delight’, culminating in...

'''...a painting so over the top...that it looks as though giant caterpillars were climbing all over a kind of mad topiary, beneath a roaring Van Goghish sky. I wish more works could be as crazy as this: Hockney captures and amplifies something of the astonishment of hawthorns in bloom.'[Adrian Searle] 

It is a very weird painting."

https://gerryco23.wordpress.com/2012/02/25/david-hockney-a-bigger-picture/
https://arthur.io/art/david-hockney/may-blossom-on-the-roman-road

May Blossom on the Roman Road
2009
Oil on 8 canvases 
91.5 x 122 each (182.8 x 244 overall)
Private collection
Exhibited at the Foundation Louis Vuitton in 2025
https://www.pacegallery.com/journal/david-hockney-fondation-louis-vuitton/

 

 

 David Hockney
(2008) 
 

Painted from memory, with brighter colours and broader outlines, Hawthorn Blossom Near Rudston 2008 takes on a different, more surreal character from the Yorkshire works painted outdoors, with the form, colours and perspectives simplified as the artist allowed his imagination to fill the canvas. 

Hawthorn blossom near Rudston
2008
Oil on 2 canvasses 
(Each 152.4 x 122 cm ) Overall 152.4 x 244cm
Private collection

 David Hockney
(2005) 
 

Today one of the Yorkshire landscapes that is not of monumental size

Tree tunnel, August 2005
Oil on canvas
61 x 91cm
Private collection