When David Hockney moved from working in the blazing sunshine of Beverly Hills to the more intermittent sunshine of Bridlington he had a problem: how to paint outdoors in the East Riding of Yorkshire in January when you’re in your 70s and you feel the cold.
He planned to paint the gradual arrival of spring at an easel en plein air but he realised it was “a bit difficult when you are stood out there in the winter”.
His solution was to use his iPad, making drawings that were shown the next year in his blockbuster 2012 show at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
Sotheby’s has now announced it is offering for sale 17 iPad drawing prints from that series, The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate. The drawings, the largest group of Hockney’s iPad works ever to come to the market, will be sold this month during the week of Frieze in London, one of the world’s most important art fairs.
Yessica Marks, the head of prints at Sotheby’s, said selling iPad prints was relatively rare and to have so many in one auction was nothing short of remarkable.
Lot 117, a scene from The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate (2011) by Hockney, carries an estimate of £80,000-£120,000. Photograph: Sotheby’s
“To put it into context, in nearly a decade at Sotheby’s worldwide we’ve only sold 24 iPad drawings by Hockney and only half of them are from this series,” she said. “So to see 17 in one auction is unprecedented and something the market has never witnessed. We’re beyond excited.”
Marks said images of the prints did not do them justice and you had to see them up close to appreciate their “presence and impact”.
The prints were intense and vivid and full of life, she said. “Honestly, the reason we don’t sell them that often is because people just do not want to part with them. They are so treasured.”
Marks said Hockney had had a long-lasting love affair with technology. “Since the 80s he experimented with tools that you were more likely to find in an office than an artist’s studio – he would use the photocopier, fax machine, Photoshop,” she said.
Hockney was also an early adopter of the iPad, first released by Apple in 2010, and soon began to see its potential.
The Bradford-born artist moved his base from Los Angeles to Bridlington about two decades ago, finding inspiration in the often overlooked beauty of the Yorkshire Wolds.
In 2011 his plan was to paint the arrival of spring on a country road called Woldgate. He planned to paint on an easel starting in January but the unpredictable winter weather made that tricky.
Hockney is someone who feels the cold, it has been said, but there were also the problems experienced by painters for centuries. “Outdoors, especially in northern Europe, the scene is constantly changing because the light conditions seldom stay the same for long,” the critic Martin Gayford wrote in the exhibition catalogue for Hockney’s 2012 show.
“The sun moves, clouds move over the sky. Painting, on the other hand, takes time. A finished picture might take many hours or days to resolve.”
Lot 102 from The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate (2011). Hockey said ‘Turner would have loved’ the iPad-based approach to drawing. Photograph: Sotheby’s
In the same catalogue, Hockney explained his thinking. “I got one of the first iPads, so I had been drawing on it for seven months before I began these landscape drawings of the seasons,” he wrote. “It took me some months to learn the technique but by then I knew how to get anything I wanted, almost.
“It’s a superb medium for some things. Turner would have loved it. You can be very, very subtle with transparent layers.”
Hockney, 88, has continued to use his iPad and drawings from his time in Normandy will feature in a show next year at the Serpentine gallery in London.
The prints being sold by Sotheby’s come from a single collection and are being sold individually, with estimates ranging from £80,000-£120,000 to £120,000-£180,000. The lowest total estimate is £1.7m. They will be sold on 17 October.
