Tag Archives: iPad

Portraits and portraying the countryside through the eyes of David Hockney

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IT IS EASY to understand the great popularity of paintings by David Hockney. They are colourful,  often cheerful, and full of life. Until 23 August 2026, there is a delightful exhibition of his work at the Serpentine North gallery in London’s Hyde Park.

 

The highlight of the show is a series of prints of images that Hockney created on his iPad  in France. They are joined together to form a huge, long picture depicting the seasons in the countryside of Normandy in France. Entitled “A Year in Normandie”, it was inspired by the famous Bayeux Tapestry. However, unlike the tapestry that portrays military activities, Hockney’s twenty-first century take on it contains only idyllic views of a peaceful countryside, changing in appearance as the year proceeds. The result is wonderful.

 

In addition to the Normandy scenes, there is a good selection of Hockney’s portraits on canvas. Painted mainly during the last year or two, many of them include objects such as tables painted so that perspective has been reversed. For example,  the front of a table in a picture is painted narrower than the distant end of it.

 

All in all, this is a great exhibition.  It shows that advancing age need not be an impediment to creative artistic productivity: Hockney is in his late eighties, soon to be 90.

David Hockney shows that age need not be an impediment to creativity

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THE ARTIST DAVID Hockney (born 1937) had his eighty-eighth birthday in July 2025.Yet age has not stopped him from creating prolifically. Today, 25 February 2026, we visited an exhibition of his work at the Anely Juda Fine Art Gallery in London’s Hanover Square. It is on until 28 February 2026.

The upper gallery on the first floor is a collection of works, moonscapes and nightscapes, that Hockney created on an iPad, and then had printed and framed. I am no lover of Hockney’s iPad creations, and those on display did not excite me. However, in the ground floor galleries, a treat awaited us. On display was a collection of oil paintings, all created by Hockney in 2025. They include several portraits, depictions of interiors with and without people, and a self-portrait in which the artist can be seen painting while seated in a wheelchair. In some of the pictures, instead of painting the view through a door or window, the artist has pasted photographs of what can be seen outside onto the canvas. Each of the paintings displays a joyful love of life and is richly coloured. In addition, Hockney experiments with perspective in some of the paintings, often with pleasantly surprising results.

To summarise, this is an exhibition worth seeing if you happen to be in London during the next few days. Like Picasso, Hockney demonstrates that advancing age need not necessarily curtail artistic expression.