“People from the village,” said David Hockney recently in The Smithsonian, “come up and tease me, ‘We hear you’ve started drawing on your telephone.’ And I tell them, ‘Well, no, actually, it’s just that occasionally I speak on my sketch pad.’” How did Hockney come to embrace digital technology, and could it be just a gimmick? His current show of work from 2002–2013, “David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition” answers these questions with a vast array of remarkable work.

Hockney has been reinventing himself for decades. After his cubist-inspired Polaroid collages and experiments with faxes, as well as a stint designing opera sets, the artist felt pulled to return to painting and his native England. As visits to the home that Hockney had purchased in Bradlington—not far from where the artist had grown up in Bradford—became more frequent, Hockney relished the luxury of undisturbed time to work en plein air. As a youth, Hockney had labored as a harvester in these same environs. After his mother passed away in 1999 at the age of 98, he moved in and set about his explorations of the nearby paths and woods with a frenzy, first in watercolor, then in oils. In 2009 he discovered the “Brushes” app on his iPhone. When the iPad came out in 2010 he began to work with its larger and more versatile interface.

The highlight of the exhibition is an extravaganza titled The Arrival of Spring, in Woldgate East Yorkshire in 2011 Version 3 (2011-2013). This work, comprised of 13 parts, includes an oil painting on 32 canvases (1 part), and 12 iPad drawings. If one were expecting to encounter a room full of glowing tablets, the manner in which these are displayed will come as a bit of a shock: each digital image of a wooded lane is printed on four large sheets of paper, the entire drawing having a striking physical presence at 93” x 70”. 

In 29 December a pale sky, shifting from faintest eggshell yellow to a tender pink, is overlaid with warm grays; jagged-edged pools of yellow and rust color describe reflections of the overhanging foliage. These mind-blowing reflecting puddles reveal a way of describing light new to Hockney, one which keeps pulling in the viewer. In the distance, a densely-hatched thicket of branches in gray-greens and mauves sets up a dynamic, buzzing rhythm. 18 December features scratched markings suggesting raindrops with primitive-feeling, arrow-like gestures and circular shapes resembling musical notes. These works reveal Hockney at his best, and most engaged. Twelve-foot high prints of his iPad works of Yosemite Valley pale a bit by comparison, perhaps suffering from a mismatch of scale.

The expansive exhibition—the largest ever mounted by the de Young—also includes a four-wall immersive video installation comprised of images of the four seasons, each displayed on nine digital monitors in a large grid. Woldgate Woods, November 7 2010 reveals nine views of a frosty landscape blanketed with snow. Hockney’s quest to expand beyond one-point perspective, the vision of the “paralyzed Cyclops” as he puts it, here compelled him to mount 9 digital video cameras to his slow-moving Land Rover, creating the illusion of leisurely progress down a country lane. Hockney’s insatiable curiosity, coupled with remarkable breakthroughs in technology, allows him to explore broader horizons, and to create these cutting-edge works using digital media.