Name: Beuvron En Auge Panorama
Brand: David Hockney
Rating: 4.9 (174 reviews)

Meaning & Analysis

Beuvron En Auge Panorama (2019) is a digital print by David Hockney created with the use of an iPad. Hockney has been drawing on the iPad since it was first released in 2010 and his artistic output inspired by the medium continues to be prolific, including 212 digital paintings produced in 2018. The print depicts a town square in Beuvron-en-Auge, a small town in Normandy, the region of France where David Hockney has been based with his partner Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima since 2018. The scene of a small town is depicted from a high viewpoint and positions the regional Norman architecture against distant, picturesque fields.

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Beuvron En Auge Panorama, like many of Hockney’s digital paintings, represents his return to the recognizable style characterised by bright colour palette and childlike imagery. Similarly to such signature works as Pembroke Studio Interior (1984), the key elements of the scene here, such as buildings, fields, and trees are vividly schematized. Orderly geometric forms dominate the image in stark contrast to the more experimental side of Hockney’s practice exemplified by such works as Celia With Chair (1986). The distinctly Norman architecture dominating the print exemplifies simplicity and precision of line. With his renewed interest in bright colour palette and orderly, geometric forms, Hockney endows the small-town landscape with a lighthearted character reminiscent of a child’s colour book.

Hockney commented in the context of visual effects the iPad allowed him to achieve: ‘This is a real new medium. So much variety is possible. You can’t overwork this because it’s not a real surface. And you can put anything on anything: a bright, bright blue on top of an intense yellow.’

A unique evidence of Hockney’s interest in the use of modern technology for the purposes of art, the print captures the manifold nature of Hockney’s creative identity. Considered alongside the early works engaging with traditional mediums such as lithography and etching, the drawing attests to a consistently progressive nature of Hockney’s fifty-year career.