The Arrival Of Spring In Woldgate East Yorkshire 19th May 2011
Signed Print

In this work we are presented with a young sapling stretching up to reach the heights of the more mature trees in the background. While we know this scene to be drawn from life in Yorkshire it presents as more tropical, its bright green tones recalling Hockney’s views of a hotel courtyard in Mexico in the Moving Focus series, or even the artist’s more abstract series, Some New Prints. Dated 19th May 2011, the work represents the beginning of the end of the artist’s journey through Spring in Yorkshire. Beginning on 1st January and ending on 2nd June, The Arrival of Spring 2011 documents both the minute and the monumental changes to the landscape around his home which he returned to in the 2000s after decades spent in the bright light of California. Here we see him both reengaging with old ground and embracing the new as he swaps the etching plate and lithography for the iPad, a digital medium which allows him to treat the screen like a sketchbook and to produce multiples of his drawings at the touch of a button. An artist who constantly seeks agency in his printmaking – as we have seen with his Home Made Prints series – for Hockney the iPad was a liberatory piece of technology which has allowed him to continue to be prolific well into his old age.