A continent away from his perennially sunny Los Angeles poolscapes of the 1960s and ’70s, the British artist David Hockney, now 85, has turned his attention to the ever-changing diurnal rhythm of the world outside his bedroom window, in Bridlington, East Yorkshire.
In 2009 Hockney began “drawing” this view on his iPhone (above), with just his thumb. “There was great advantage in this medium because it’s backlit and I could draw in the dark,” he writes in MY WINDOW (Taschen, $150), a collection of 120 digital still lifes he completed between 2009 and 2011. Plus, he never had to leave his bed.
The flowers on the sill get replaced every couple of days, and his color palette changes with the position of the sun. On the longest day of the year, it would rise to wake him at 4:30 a.m.
In 2010, Apple released the iPad. “I immediately got one from California, probably the first one in Bridlington,” Hockney writes. The size and stylus allow for greater detail and precision, and he’s been using the device for portraits and landscapes ever since. Many other iPad drawings are collected in his limited-edition, large-format career retrospective from 2016, “A Bigger Book.”
Lauren Christensen is an editor at the Book Review.
