British artist David Hockney, 84, pivots to iPad art – ‘photographs are very boring’ now, he says, though they used to be central to his work
- His iPad has become David Hockney’s preferred way to make art, and an exhibition of the many works he created during lockdown kicks off in France on Wednesday
- The British artist says landscapes remain an interesting subject for art but ‘you’ve got to make them a bit different – and that’s what I’ve tried to do’
British artist David Hockney has always been a workhorse, so his months of lockdown in France were a welcome opportunity to devote himself to observing nature.
“I really enjoy looking,” says the dapper 84-year-old. “If you look at the world, it’s very beautiful. But you’ve got to have a clear head and there’s lots of things that stop you looking.”
Hockney was speaking at the Orangerie Museum in Paris, which is displaying the stunning fruits of his lockdown period in an exhibition, “A Year in Normandy”, that opens on October 13.
It features a 91-metre-long (300 foot) frieze of the same name made up of some of the 220 pictures he created during the strange year of solitude in 2020.
It is a clear nod to the 19th-century masters of landscape, particularly Monet, who inhabits some of the neighbouring rooms in the museum.
