Published: 19 January, 2012
by JOHN EVANS

An opening gallery featuring four oils, each of eight canvases, each of three prominent trees at Thixendale, south of Malton, sets the theme of David Hockney’s new show.

They are bright, colourful depictions of the Yorkshire landscape over time; in this case covering the seasons from summer 2007 to autumn 2008.

Time is now important for Hockney who, aged 74, perhaps predictably has found himself dubbed “a national treasure” in the run-up to the Royal Academy’s first major exhibition of 2012, which opens on Saturday.

The show was the inspired idea of co-curator Edith Devaney who suggested the merit of offering the entire gallery space to Hockney back in 2007.

By 2005 Hockney was back in Britain, in Bridlington, and A Bigger Picture (the title echoing his 1967 California pool painting A Bigger Splash) celebrates his homecoming, featuring more than 150 works, many exhibited here for the first time; three major new groups explore his fascination with light and landscape, the beauty and motif of trees and the cycles of growth.

Yet there are certainly more branches than roots displayed in the galleries and the irony, of course, is that Hockney for so long made his home in California where he moved in the early 1960s. As co-curator Marco Livingstone says: “…he wanted intense light that he’d noticed in Hollywood films.”

The variety of media – from charcoal, through acrylic, photo-collage, watercolour, oil and on to his more recent use of iPad prints and film – offers something for fans of each era of a long career; but this is only part retrospective because Hockney’s output remains prolific. Livingstone says: “With the experience of a lifetime of looking at nature and painting vivid colours he’s found his own voice and reinvented himself as a landscape painter.”

And what reinvention. Hockney has risen to the challenge. Rarely can these galleries have witnessed such a joyful explosion of colour.

“To see colour you do have to look,” he says. “In southern California you don’t get a big change in spring.” But with Yorkshire: “It’s a landscape I know from my childhood so it has meaning. I never thought of it as a subject until 10 years ago.”

In fact in 1997 Hockney spent six months in Yorkshire to be near to his dying friend Jonathan Silver, who had encouraged him to paint locally. A daily drive between Bridlington and Wetherby inspired him to produce six studio paintings from memory, including The Road Across the Wolds, 1997 (see right).

He later used watercolour and oils again for a series of Yorkshire works from observation in a deliberate bid to reject the influence of the camera.

There are important rooms, too, devoted to repeat motifs and large-scale works on multiple canvases; a group of paintings of a farm track near Kirkham in the East Riding; seven large works from a single viewpoint picturing Woldgate Woods in 2006; another group examines blossom; another death and decay.

The artist embraces technological change, with sketchbooks in part supplanted with an iPad (“Faster than any medium I’ve come across”). These have led to print enlargements depicting the grandeur of the Yosemite valley.

Hockney’s choice for the main gallery space is The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty-eleven) with 51 prints enlarged from iPad sketches and a “theatrical” 32-canvas oil of fully 9.75 metres across the back wall.

Other gems include two oils held by Bradford Museums and Galleries, his home city, and dating from student days, 1956; Grand Canyon works of the 1990s and, exceptionally, a series of paintings inspired by The Sermon on the Mount painted in about 1656 by Claude Lorrain (c1604-1682).

• David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture is at the Royal Academy of Arts, Piccadilly, from January 21 to April 9. Tickets £14, concessions available. Advance booking 0844 209 0051 or visit www. royalacademy.org.uk for full details. The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne and sponsored by BNP Paribas.