David Hockney instills spring warmth into lockdown darkness
Enrique Rubio
London, May 18 (EFE).- While the world was still coming to terms with the pandemic, British artist David Hockney grabbed his iPad brush and painted daily breaths of spring for his closest friends, lifting their spirits through lockdown with his lively and joyous illustrations.
As the United Kingdom emerges from its third lockdown, Hockney (83), based in France, released to the public the product of five months contemplating nature and unleashing his masterful skill with the latest technologies.
In fact, he employs a tablet app specifically designed for him by a team of mathematicians.
His exhibition The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020 demonstrates the artist, one of the most influential of the past century, has lost no artistic vigour or subtlety.
The gallery, which once again links the “pool painter” with Van Gogh, will be displayed at London’s Royal Academy of Arts starting next Sunday until the end of September.
Curator Edith Devaney said it is no accident that Hockney moved to Normandy, the epicentre of impressionism, to embark on a project which he had already started a decade earlier in Yorkshire.
Back then, according to Hockney himself, he “drew” spring on his iPad; now he has “painted” it. Breakthroughs in digital painting have allowed him to reach new heights of quality in his art, which exhibits enhanced depth in 2020.
March 2020 witnessed one of the most sunny and magnificent springs Europe has seen in recent memory. Locked inside and paralyzed by uncertainty, most artists wondered what they would do now that museums and art galleries were shut.
From his farm in Beuvron-sur-Auge, northwestern France, Hockney already knew he would paint the spring and nothing would stop him. His intention: celebrating nature and proving that, in his own words, “spring cannot be cancelled.”
