By Anna Zhila, artist, music and art critic
David Hockney never followed rules. The British artist - who died at his London home on 11 June 2026, aged 88 - wielded his curiosity like a brush: experimental, unflinching, alive to possibility right to the end. When he began making art on his iPad in 2009, critics dismissed it as a playful dalliance, a tech-savvy octogenarian's quirky detour. Over the decade that followed, his digital works became something far more profound: a redefinition of what it meant to paint in the 21st century.
The glow of an iPad screen might seem an unlikely rival to oil on canvas, but Hockney's vibrant landscapes and intimate portraits proved otherwise. These pieces were never digital facsimiles of traditional art; they were a testament to how technology can expand, rather than diminish, artistic expression. Sceptics remained - but to write the work off as a gimmick was to misunderstand both the artist and the medium.
The iPad as a Canvas
Hockney's iPad paintings were often described as "digital," but the label missed the point. What he was really doing was painting - just without the mess. The screen became an extension of his hand, its glass surface alive under his fingertips. With quick swipes and taps he conjured cherry blossom in Kyoto or the rolling hills of Yorkshire, each stroke as deliberate as if it had been made with sable bristles.
There was a tactile intimacy to his process. He painted in bed at dawn, the iPad propped on his knees, its light blending with the morning sun. The tool's immediacy was the point. Unlike traditional media, the iPad let him undo, layer and experiment endlessly - not a surrender to convenience, but a recalibration of spontaneity. The speed at which he worked mirrored the fleeting effects of watercolour, yet the results felt timeless.
In a sense, the iPad was Hockney's 21st-century sketchbook - a place where ideas could be caught mid-flight, but one offering infinite possibilities. He once compared it to the camera lucida, the 19th-century optical device that helped artists trace perspective. Both bridge observation and creation; the iPad simply did so without mechanical constraint.
The Emotional Resonance of His Digital Brushstrokes
What lifted these works beyond novelty was their emotional weight. Take The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire (2011), a series of iPad paintings documenting the same landscape across months. The digital strokes pulse with life - frost-thickened branches, rain-slicked paths, the first blush of green. Critics fixated on the medium, but the real magic lay in how Hockney used it to amplify feeling.
Colour, always central to his work, took on new dimensions. The backlit screen intensified his hues, lending his yellows the warmth of sunlight and his blues the depth of twilight. Yet the effect was never garish; there was a softness to the digital brushwork, a quality akin to pastel. That duality - vibrancy tempered with subtlety - created a tension traditional media struggle to replicate.
If Monet's water lilies were a symphony, Hockney's iPad works were jazz. Both rooted in tradition, but one thriving on improvisation. His digital paintings breathe, shift and surprise. A single line might start thin and hesitant, then bloom into a confident curve. It was this human imperfection, embedded in a supposedly "cold" medium, that gave the work its soul.
Hockney's iPad paintings were never a rejection of the past; they were a conversation with it. They asked what it means to make art in an age when screens dominate our lives - and his answer was clear: technology, wielded with intention, can deepen our connection to the world rather than erase it.
The true test of any medium is whether it disappears in service of the art. With Hockney's iPad paintings, it did. You forget the pixels. You see the blossoms.
