Hockney and the art of making a splash

David Hockney, 83, is the coolest kid on the block, delivering a masterclass in meme creation and trolling, and all while telling us that he’s just innocently recreating the vibe of Monet and Seurat on an iPad. Who knew a man in command of an Apple Pencil could wield such power?

The Yorkshireman is everywhere this month. The Arrival of Spring at the Royal Academy opens on Sunday. The London Underground commissioned him to create a new sign for Piccadilly Circus Tube station and there has been a takeover of five of the most iconic LED billboards from New York’s Times Square to the Gangnam District in Seoul with his animation of a sunrise.

But what’s grabbing the attention is the paradox. The venerable Hockney is a great draughtsman and artist. He is handling some fairly sophisticated digital technology. With that combination, you could create anything. And he goes but a little beyond an Etch-a-Sketch.

Those big screens usually display the slick videography of advertising. Walk past during the Hockney time slot and you will see his short jerky animation entitled “Remember you cannot look at the sun or death for very long”. A sun, the beams painted in shaky pencil lines on the iPad, rises up over a countryside landscape and expands to fill the whole LED canvas. If you didn’t know it was Hockney you might think it was a local primary school’s end-of-term project. The more discerning art critic may note the influences from JMW Turner to Instagram’s #sunrise tags and the opening sequence of Teletubbies.

Here’s an old boy who has abandoned the higher subtleties of painting for the pixel

He takes this sketchy art to another level with the sign for Piccadilly Circus Tube sign. Hockney was asked to create a new logo for it as part of a London post-pandemic promotional campaign. Again a creation on an iPad, it turned the traditional Tube roundel into a hand-drawn yellow circle, with a purple bar across it and “Piccadilly Circus” in shaky handwritten letters. It would have been hard to do a worse job on a 1992 edition of Microsoft Paint.

But if looking for beauty or meaning, you were missing the point. This drawing is in the visual language used by the jokesters of Twitter and Reddit, a medium that operates on call and response. And the jokesters took the bait. Within minutes of London mayor Sadiq Khan posting the Hockney design online, others whipped out their iPads and mocked up similarly terrible signs for King’s Cross and Oxford Street. The joke was met with another joke. Call it critical response, or call it a meme.

It is not just that Hockney seems to be cheating by creating art or design that a five-year-old could do (and in this instance, they really could). It is also that it is done via microchips and plastic-tipped pencils. The creation is simple, so too the act of creating it.

Those art experts who specialise in X-raying old paintings to discover how the artist applied his marks might as well get their coats now. The technique is laid out for all to see in one of the first exhibits at the Royal Academy.

Unlike most of the works on show, which are large-scale prints, “Cherry Tree, 4th May 2020” is a short video, a playback of the process as Hockney sketches. You can see how he draws in the grass and branches of a cherry tree, picking through the brush tools on the iPad app to create the hatching of the sky, using colour-fills on objects.

I dabble with drawing using an iPad — he uses the Brushes app, I use Procreate — but I would struggle to create as Hockney does because I ask the opposite of the machine: I want it to make me look like a better artist using its effects and the ability to change every pixel to conceal my shame that I can’t do it by hand. Not so Hockney, who just lets it all hang out.

What is on show at the Royal Academy, a series of meditations on landscapes, portraits of trees, and still lifes, is not radical at all. It is Impressionism for the 21st century — there is even a landscape series of trees and bushes over the course of the day à la Monet’s “Haystacks”. One picture of a treehouse uses the same palette as Van Gogh’s “Almond Blossom”.

The sacrilege for the old-schoolers seems to be paying homage to those artists in pixels rather than oil. However, if you still believe that there is something divine in how the human hand conveys the working of the mind on canvas, that great thoughts cannot exist in pixels generated by a microchip, I have one quick question: are you still writing your letters by hand? Thought not.

But he’s also playing the youngsters, a generation who use their iPads as a signifier of cool, who bestride the digital realm. Here’s an old boy who has abandoned the higher subtleties of painting for the pixel — as momentous a moment as Dylan going electric — and who can own Twitter for an afternoon. After six decades in the game, getting yourself talked about is an art form in itself.

Follow Joy on Twitter @joy_lo_dico

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