David Hockney’s iPhone PassionLawrence Weschler, October 22, 2009 David Hockney Three images by David Hockney —a self-portrait, a still life, and a summer dawn —made with the Brushes application on his iPhone, 2009 After two decades of regularly finding himself ca ught up in all sorts of seemingly extraneous side-passions (photocollages, operatic stage design, fax extravaganzas, homemade photocopier print runs, a controversial revisionist art-historical investigation, and a watercolor idyll), David Hockney, now age seventy-two, has finally taken to painting once again, doing so, over the past three or four years, wit h a vividness and a sheer productivity perhaps never before seen in his career. This recent body of work c onsists almost entirely of seasonal landscapes of the rolling hills, hedgerows, tree stands, valley wolds, and farm fields surrounding the somewhat déclassé onetime summer seaside resort of Bridlington, England, on the North Sea coast, where he now lives. Some are intimately scaled but many are among the largest, most ambitious canvases of his entire career. The paintings have been widely exhibited —in London (at the Tate and the Royal Academy), in Los Angeles, a broad overview in a small museum in German y this past summer—though not yet in New York, a situation that will be recti fied in late October by a major show, his first there in ten years, slated to take up both the uptown and downtown spaces at PaceWildenstein. 1 The buildup toward these shows has found Hockney busier than ever (he is still in the process of completi ng a dozen fresh canvases as I write), but not so busy that he hasn‘t managed to become fascinated by yet another new (and virtuall y diametrically opposite) technology, one that he is pursuing with almost as much verve and fascination: drawing on his iPhone .Hockney first became interested in iPhones about a year ago (he grabbed the one I happened to be using right out of my hands). He acquired one of his own and began using it as a high- powered reference tool, searching out paintings on the Web and cropping appropriate details as part of the occasional polemics or appreciations with which he is wont to shower his friends.
