Hockney and the iPhone

David Hockney is renowned for tinkering with technology, such as photography and fax machines, in his artwork. But hidden at the end of this great profile in this weekend’s New York Times is, to my mind, a really fascinating fact about his use of new media today:

Mr. Hockney, wearing one of the old Savile Row suits he likes to paint in (“Even when they’re wrecked, they still look good”), was sitting at a table in the middle of the space, holding forth on the stupidity of smoking bans and his theories about lenses, mirrors and image making, and showing off his iPhones. With the program Brushes, he uses them to paint miniaturized sunrises and still lifes; he now has two, because he quickly filled the first.

It was immediately clear that — his new passion for plein-air painting aside — Mr. Hockney has a new love: digital technology. Around the room hung multiple photographs by Jonathan Wilkinson, his full-time technology assistant, of artworks that were also hanging on the walls. They were so exact that it was often hard to tell the originals from the photographs.

The confusion was intensified because some of the originals actually began life as photographs — like the two 27-foot-long friezes depicting a group of trees Mr. Hockney noticed at the edge of town, which he photographed individually, then collaged together and detailed in Photoshop. Others were made at home on a Macintosh, including portraits he painted earlier this year using Photoshop and a Wacom tablet. (A selection will be at Pace Prints.) Near a table covered with video cameras, someone had tacked up printouts of Mr. Hockney’s iPhone paintings.

Mr. Hockney also uses the computer to compose his paintings, either to help him step back and regard the whole of a multipanel work or to refine individual canvases. He often tries out colors and ideas on a photograph of an unfinished painting, or plays around with a JPEG of the image in Photoshop. Afterward he returns to the studio to put his ideas on canvas.

There’s a very interesting audio slideshow and an excerpt from a Hockney documentary too.

David Hockney’s Long Road Home (NYT)