David Hockney Yosemite Series For Sale

David Hockney moved to California in 1964, from the gloom of post war Britain where homosexuality was still illegal. Impassioned by the vibrant landscapes and light of LA, he created some of his most compelling artworks based on it, including The Yosemite Suite in 2010. The groundbreaking series, which depicts the beauty and vistas of the Yosemite National Park, nestled deep in the Sierra Nevada mountains, is Hockney’s first venture into the digital medium: he created the series on his Apple Ipad (the first year it came out) yet it evokes his characteristically colourful landscape paintings of his early career, so the artist creates a new dialogue within his own art form.

The Yosemite Suite is a 24 print series, so richly depicted through colour and narrative, via these landscape forms, that Hockney transcends debates around digital authenticity. Having created works segueing between lithography, etching and screen printing, Hockney continues to show his artistic adaptability as he evolves his visual language to work with developing technology.

Hockney worked with the Brushes app to ‘paint’ the views en plein air, circling his artistic discourse back to the famed painting styles of Monet and Turner, whom he so admired. Unlike earlier works, such as The Weather Series, where he used ink, pen, paint to make preparatory sketches before transferring the work to a lithographic stone, with the Ipad, Hockney can work directly onto the screen, picking from hundreds of colour shades and textures: so colour sings in The Yosemite Series.

Hockney once said, ‘we can only replenish ourselves by looking at nature,’ so to create his first digital series, of course he ventured to the Yosemite National Park, one of his favourite Californian landmarks: The Yosemite Suite series recalls his 90’s landscape paintings, such as Garrowby Hill, The Road Across the Wolds, in digital form but heightens the colour clashes: tall standing trees, cascading waterfalls, biodiverse greenery and granite cliffs are filtered through the lens of acid green, electric blue, neon purple and bright pinks. Unlike the earlier landscape works, Hockney ventures into new territory in The Yosemite Series by depicting humans in some of the scenes: Yosemite Suite 15 depicts a group of tourists looking at the large granite cliff over a ridge, in which Hockney’s eye for fragmented details and textural depth means the composition appears both fantastical and realistic.

Arguably, these Ipad drawings are an even greater example of Hockney’s colourist vision as he manages to blend the colour tones to create multi perspective to the picture and create a landscape portrait that appears spatial and dimensional, even though it is drawn onto a screen surface. The series is ultimately an ode to both Yosemite National Park as a sanctuary for creative thinkers over past centuries, but also to the enduring power of nature to make us dream.