Yorkshire art legend’s landscapes go on show in London (From York Press)

Landscapes by artist David Hockney go on show in London

9:04am Thursday 19th January 2012 in Exhibitions

DAVID Hockney’s East Yorkshire landscapes will be taking over the Royal Academy of Arts in London when his new exhibition of paintings, films and iPad drawings opens on Saturday.

Many of them large in scale and created specifically for the Royal Academy’s main galleries, they form part of a show of 150 works, spanning the 50 years since his college days in Bradford.

Highlights include three groups of new work made since 2005, when Hockney returned from five decades in California to live in Bridlington; the springboard for his intense observation of the Yorkshire Wolds landscapes he first knew in childhood.

“The landscape is a lot more subtle, whereas West Yorkshire is often quite wild, far more dramatic, and most people driving through the Wolds think they are driving just through a load of fields and don’t notice it,” the artist, now 74, said.

The exhibition, David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture, was inspired in part by his largest work, Bigger Trees Near Warter, his 2007 depiction of a landscape near the East Yorkshire village, which attracted more than 130,000 visitors to York Art Gallery last year.

“The Royal Academy came to me three or four years ago to ask if I was interested in doing a show of the work I was doing in Yorkshire,” he recalls.

Accepting the invitation, he has embraced the opportunity to explore new technology and fresh formats to continue his fascination with landscapes.

This has led Hockney to use the Brush app on his iPad to draw Wolds woodland and to experiment with filming the East Yorkshire countryside with nine cameras for display on multiple screens.

The exhibition will run until April 9 and is complemented by such merchandise as a £45 Hockney bone china ashtray, no doubt in recognition of his much publicised, defiant love of a cigarette.

• See tomorrow’s Twenty4Seven for Charles Hutchinson’s report from the exhibition.