The Arrival Of Spring In Woldgate, East Yorkshire In 2011 (twenty eleven) - 23 April
Signed Print

A scene familiar from the series The Arrival of Spring greets us. A winding road leads our eye into the distance, bordered by green branches and shrubs. The pastoral idyll is interrupted by the presence of a telegraph pole, however, reminding us that this is a contemporary landscape, along with the fact of the work’s medium.

‘Painted’ on an iPad the work shows Hockney experimenting once again with a new medium of print. Having covered lithography, screen printing, etching and even photocopying as a medium in the 2010s the artist turned towards this ubiquitous digital device in order to transform his sketches into digital prints. Here we see him using the various techniques and tools of an app to create a contrast of soft and hard marks to build the rural landscape. The work is unmistakably gestural and puts us in direct relation to the artist’s hand as it traces his vision across the screen.

The Arrival of Spring in 2011 was originally intended to be a single work of art, presented in an exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, including one monumental oil painting and 51 of the iPad drawings as prints. These were later split to form 49 prints at a smaller size in an edition of 25 – of which 23rd of April is one – and a group of 12 in a larger size in an edition of 10.