Is David Hockney the greatest living English artist? (From York Press)

David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture, Royal Academy of Arts, London, January 21 to April 9

11:46am Friday 20th January 2012 in Exhibitions

Is Hockney the greatest living English artist? Never mind all that, says Charles Hutchinson, just enjoy the simple pleasures in colour that his work celebrates

THINK back to last year’s David Hockney exhibition at York Art Gallery, the one with only one painting, his biggest ever work, Bigger Trees Near Warter.

Painted in oil on 50 separate canvasses and then pieced together, his East Yorkshire landscape measured 15ft by 40ft and took up an entire wall, just as it did when it was painted to fit the dimensions of the Royal Academy four years earlier.

If that was “Bigger”, then the invitation by the Royal Academy to make its main galleries his plaything has led to everything being bigger still about David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture, the first major showcase of his landscape work past, present, and with an eye to the future too, on account of his embracing iPad and film technology.

Indeed past meets future in myriad forms in the centrepiece, The Arrival Of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty-eleven), a work that combines 51 iPad drawings on three walls with a giant painting on the fourth as Hockney’s response to filling a central gallery the size of a chapel.

The iPad Brush app, enabling the Bradford master to work quickly in the field and then stretching the works to a bigger scale in his Bridlington studio, represents the future.

Hockney re-discovering his Yorkshire childhood visits to the Wolds, the supposed poor relation to the Dales and the Moors, represents links with the past (along with several rooms of earlier landscape work on show), now that he has swapped West Coast Los Angeles for East Coast Brid.

This is a very big show, 150 pieces in all, arguably too big to see in one chunk, as a visit on Tuesday affirmed when two and a half hours still required rushing around to take in the 12 galleries. It is partly the overload of bravura colours, blue trees, blackcurrant and liquorice roads, and pink, pink and more pink. East Yorkshire, not as you would know it, but East Yorkshire as you may now come to appreciate it more.

“The difference in East Yorkshire is that there aren’t many tourists,” Hockney remarked to Hockney export Marco Livingstone in 2008. “They come for the coast, but the Wolds, as far as I know, nobody ever comes as a tourist to it.

“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.”

They will do now, or so hopes the Country Landowners Association (CLA), which anticipates a tide of tourists in this age of “staycation Britain”, in much the way that All Creatures Great And Small boosted the Dales and all bookish things Bronte furnish the Moors.

“Tourism businesses operating in and around sites that feature in the new exhibition, such as Garrowby Hill, Sledmere, Warter, Thixendale and Kilham, would be well advised to make sure they’re prepared for a surge of interest this summer,” says regional director Dorothy Fairburn.

They are in for a shock, much like Dorothy experiencing colour for the time in Oz after the black-and-white stoicism of Kansas, but the shock will be in reverse, the colour drained from Hockney’s super-calorific works to nature’s more subtle canvas.

Hockney first pumped up the volume in 1997 for his series of six oil paintings of East Yorkshire, commissioned by Salts Mills’ visionary director, the late Jonathan Silver, his long-standing friend, supporter and collector, who badgered him to paint his Yorkshire homeland for a show in his homage-to-Hockney 1853 Gallery at Saltaire.

All six are gathered once more, like a reunited champion team, and if you take a blinkered God’s Own Country view of how to navigate A Bigger Picture, these are past works to see, along with the first room of Thixendale Trees.

Make sure to breathe in the abundant delights of his Hawthorn Blossom series too, a celebration of the brief spring burst of colour that looks creamier than Vignotte cheese.

Be strict with yourself by cherry-picking the best of Yorkshire. Make a beeline for Tunnels, with its repeat motif of the group of trees that lines Rudston, near Burton Agnes, and in particular for the Trees and Totems room for the exhibition’s signature image, Winter Timber, where the logs, tree stump and line of blue trunks that turns into a vortex suggests a contemplation of ageing.

Hockney is 74, no longer the dyed-blonde West Yorkshire enfant terrible, but a more cussed, still witty “greatest living English artist” (previous occupant, Lucien Freud), who will defend the antediluvian pursuits of smoking and countryside sports, while still forging ahead with new artistic possibilities.

Those possibilities are most topically represented in his iPad works, the show’s prime conversation pieces.

Some might dismiss them as little more than an advance on Etchasketch doodles, others will say they are more science than art, appearing flat and synthetic, especially in his huge Yosemite Park tableaux, their colours faded as if exposed to the sun.

For now, the iPad is better as an electronic replacement for a sketchbook, but such past Hockney innovations as his 1980s photo-collages did more than play with technology.

Rather more immediately exciting is his new series of films shown on 18 screens, a configuration that far outstrips the four-screen experiments of Timecode, Mike Figgis’s film from 2000. Whereas Figgis filmed four frames of simultaneous action, Hockney uses nine cameras to focus intently on one scene, be it the Woldgate countryside in different seasons (then show in juxtaposition) or a dance in his yellow-floored studio choreographed by Wayne Sleep with Royal Ballet dancers. Multi-media theatre and ballet companies alike will be licking their lips at the prospect of using such camerawork.

Hockney is excited by this new experimentation too. “It’s not an end,” he told the Independent. “It’s another beginning.”

Is he the greatest living English artist? Better to say he is the greatest living artist willing to change while celebrating the oldest joy of art: the simple pleasure of colour.

• David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture runs in the Main Galleries, Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, from tomorrow until April 9, open daily 10am to 6pm; last admission, 5.30pm; late opening, Fridays, until 10pm, last admission 9.30pm. Admission: £14, concessions £3 to £13; under sevens, free. Bookings: 0844 209 0051 or royalacademy.org.uk

Nearest tube station: Piccadilly Circus.

• Exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne.