David Hockney Yosemite Suite No.13 For Sale

David Hockney said of his Yosemite Suite series based on digital drawings created on his new Apple Ipad, in 2010, the first time it came out; “Everything you need is in the iPad. You don't need water or a lot of pencils, so there's no need to clean up afterwards. You can set up a palette very quickly and add more detail. The colour is right at your fingertips.”

 

Yosemite Suite No.13 is an abstract depiction of a recognisable area of the famed, grandiose Yosemite National Park, five hours drive outside of Los Angeles. Hockney loved the visual splendour of the area, including the legacy of the natural parkland and used the Yosemite Suite series to depict all parts of it: this Yosemite Suite No.13 focuses on depicting the vast waterfalls cascading down the gentle green mountainsides, in the parkland, known as El Capitan. In juxtaposition to the downward flowing water streams, the trees are depicted in round lines and swirls, twisting upwards. However, we see it through the eyes of a group of park tourists who appear to have got out of their parked cars to take in the vast splendour.

 

Hockney depicts the familiar sight, as if three dimensionally, even though he is executing the artwork on a two-dimensional screen surface: the towering waterfall is merely hinted at through soft shades of brushed green colours. We cannot exactly see the waterfall but the tones and ‘brushes app’ effect of the Ipad medium, enable Hockney to create this fragmented interpretation. The soft green shaded focus point is punctuated by the yellow and red cars in the parking lot: they appear tiny as do the abstracted shapes of the few tourists, which heightens the immensity of the vast granite cliff and landscape in the background.

 

Unusually for his landscape artworks, Hockney features people in Yosemite Suite No.13: so he connects Yosemite National Park, a democratic public parkland, with American cultural identity and the importance of preserving nature’s greatest open spaces.