David Hockney's iPhone and iPad Paintings: Revolutionizing Digital Creativity

British painter David Hockney (b. 1937) has ascended to meteoric heights in the Art World for his colorfully bold figurative paintings of people, architecture, interior spaces, and landscapes over the last six decades. Awash in spectral colors, the corpus of his art is rooted in the geography of his home and workspaces - London, Los Angeles, Yorkshire, and most recently, Normandy.

A fervent, lifelong enthusiast of oil and acrylic-based painting, Hockney’s sense of artistic adventure led to his continual exploration and experimentation with disparate mediums and styles, from his aquatint etchings and impressionistically fragmented paintings of the early-1960s to his photographic collages and abstracted V.N. paintings of the 1980s and 1990s.

Although Hockney is lauded as one of the world’s most successful living artists, it is virtually impossible to pinpoint his precise stylistic and art movement affiliations, for he is far too versatile for adequate categorization.

However, a momentous shift occurred that forever changed Hockney’s creative output. In 2007, the artist acquired an iPhone solely for communication with family, friends, and associates. Hockney’s sister, Margaret, recommended trying an app geared explicitly toward art-making: Brushes. Shortly after he started to use it in 2009, Hockney almost immediately grew enamored with the opportunity to fuse technology and artistic production. The accessibility of the digital paint tools and the speed at which he could execute artwork after artwork were among the principal reasons for his embrace of Brushes. Known for his signature luminous palettes, the built-in backlighting meant his digital paintings were automatically infused with an illuminating foundation to brighten the compositions further. To Hockney’s delight, such a tool was helpful in likening him to his Art History idols, the Impressionists, who frequently made use of white or light-colored grounds to enhance lighting and color effects.

David Hockney (English, b. 1937), Untitled, 496, 2009, iPhone.

David Hockney (English, b. 1937), Untitled, 494, 2009, iPhone.

Hockney’s enthusiasm for a novel approach to art-making was only intensified upon the release of the iPad in 2010. Within a few years, Hockney produced thousands of digital portraits, landscapes, interior spaces, and still life between his regular use of the iPhone and iPad (Note: all of this was and is accomplished in tandem with his hands-on paintings).

Unfortunately, an issue emerged in 2016 when the Brushes app underwent an update. The app with which Hockney grew accustomed became unrecognizable to him, to which Hockney remarked: “… they altered it, to improve it they said. Well, I thought they had ruined it, and the new iPads wouldn’t take it”. Thankfully, through the intervention of Hockney’s assistant Jonathan Wilkinson and a mathematician from Leeds, a far superior update was implemented in 2018. As such, this version was conducive to all of Hockney’s essential digital painting needs.

The intrinsic value behind Hockney’s iPhone and iPad paintings on technical, visual, and exhibition levels is worth noting.

Even through a digital platform, Hockney’s works achieve a degree of painterliness that is equally impactful and aesthetically magnificent as his oil and acrylic pieces. Through the magic of his fingers and a stylus, Hockney effortlessly incorporates traditional painting techniques into compositions that appear uncannily similar to what can be performed on the canvas: pointillism (In Front of the House, 2019), atmospheric perspective (Yosemite I, October 16th, 2011, 2011), vanishing point (The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 - 31 May, 2011), gestural brushstrokes (Untitled 175, 2009), and cross-hatching (Untitled 791, 2011), among others.?

David Hockney (English, b. 1937), In Front of the House, 2019, iPad.

David Hockney (English, b. 1937), Yosemite I, October 16th, 2011, 2011, iPad.

David Hockney (English, b. 1937), The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 - 31 May, 2011 No. 1 (900), 2011, iPad.

David Hockney (English, b. 1937), Untitled 175, 2009, iPhone.?

David Hockney (English, b. 1937), Untitled 791, 2011, iPad.

In keeping with the spirit of Hockney’s exuberance, every work conveys a sense of vitality, optimism, and tranquility. Each digital painting is an intimate moment unto itself with which anyone can forge a connection - gazing up at the rising sun from the comforts of bed on an early morn, admiring the beauty and aroma of a vase of flowers, traversing woodland paths on a sunny spring afternoon, or, finding solace in the slower pace of life in a rural French village. An immediacy is ever-present as if to say the creation of these works was initiated by the artist’s romantic impulse to stop and smell the roses (and paint them, too). The ultimate expression of joie de vivre.?

Museum and gallery retrospectives of his art have been constant, but the arrival of Hockney’s iPhone and iPad paintings in the late-2000s and early-2010s meant these institutions needed to adapt to evolving exhibition displays. Grey New York’s 2021 exhibition, Hockney in Normandy, chronicled the artist’s experiences during the COVID-19 lockdown in the French countryside (where he moved in 2019 in pursuit of the nation’s carte blanche stance on smoking). Hockney’s iPad landscapes were printed and encased behind frames to closely associate them with traditional painting exhibitions. The reproducibility of digital art ensures that any work may be concurrently exhibited at multiple museums and galleries, which would effectively bypass the inconvenience of loaning a single artwork.?

David Hockney (English, b. 1937), The Seven Dwarves' House, No. 316, 30 April, 2020, iPad.

Alternatively, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark’s 2011 exhibition, David Hockney: Me Draw on iPad, took advantage of the technological capacities behind iPhone and iPad art. Still life and landscape scenes were magnified to immense scales to be viewed on screen projectors. Consequently, this initiative from the museum’s curatorial team generated an immersive, multimedia viewing experience.?

Installation view of David Hockney: Me Draw on iPad at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark, 2011.

Installation view of David Hockney at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, 2017 - 2018.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2017 - 2018 colossal retrospective, David Hockney, delved right into the heart of Hockney’s i-art: examining the entire creative process from the virtual blank canvas to the finalized translucent color scape.?

However, fanfare surrounding Hockney’s iPhone and iPad art was not limited to the Art World, for it expanded into one of the highest echelons of society: The British Monarchy. Commissioned by The Very Reverend Dr. John Hall to celebrate the decades-long reign of Queen Elizabeth II, Hockney was presented with the daunting task of conceiving a stained glass window for display in the historic Gothic-style Westminster Abbey; it was only fitting that the artist immediately set to work on the design for the windows via his iPad the very same day he received this royal request.?

Unveiled in September 2018, The Queen’s Window is a Hockney iPad painting transformed into a glass form situated along Westminster Abbey’s north transept between older, traditional religious stained glass. Intent on capturing the Queen’s identity and the essence of British nationhood, he produced a vertically-oriented scene of the Yorkshire Wolds, a personal idyll for Elizabeth II. A deep-blue cloudless sky frames the bucolic setting over a winding red path betwixt a series of hawthorn trees that explode in spectacular shades of red, blue, yellow, pink, green, and orange. Not only did the work shed more light on the relevance of digital painting, but Hockney also received much praise for offering a contemporary take on stained glass making after the medium endured decades of criticism as “the poor sister to the art world”.?

David Hockney (English, b. 1937), The Queen's Window, stained glass, 2018, Westminster Abbey, London, England, United Kingdom.

David Hockney has officially raised the bar for the limitless possibilities that can be reaped from digital art-making. What began as simple experimentation swiftly evolved into an internationally recognized medium. The invention of the paint tube in the 1840s ushered in the Impressionist en plein air technique. Yet, Hockney’s download of a recently created iPhone app yielded an even more technically accessible and visually variable approach to painting. A Hockney iPhone or iPad painting can be viewed on a small scale behind a glass display in a gallery, can be blown to incredible proportions in a major museum exhibition, can be a source of contemplation during Mass at Westminster Abbey, or more intimately, can be an attachment in an email exchange from the artist himself (for those lucky few in his close connections). Hockney proceeds to amaze us in his daily art adventures, and perhaps the bold moves he has taken to capture and appreciate the world around him will inspire the next generation of great artists. In moments like these, we aspire to be one of the recipients of a newly made iPhone or iPad painting on Hockney’s personal email list.

David Hockney in front of The Queen's Window, 2018, Westminster Abbey, London, England, United Kingdom.