The seasons have long inspired artists, offering not only a changing visual palette but also a framework for thinking about time, transformation and renewal. Within the world of modern and contemporary art, few artists have explored the cycle of seasons with as much intensity and variety as David Hockney and Damien Hirst, alongside other artists represented at Andipa Editions whose work reflects on the rhythms of nature. Their approaches differ, some celebratory, others meditative or even unsettling, but each find in the passing of spring to winter a language that speaks as much to human experience as it does to the natural world.
David Hockney’s fascination with the seasons is most famously expressed in his depictions of the Yorkshire countryside, which he returned to repeatedly after moving back to England in the early 2000s. His Woldgate Woods series is perhaps the most ambitious statement on this theme. By painting the same woodland path at different points in the year, Hockney creates a dialogue between permanence and change. The trees remain, but the colours, textures, and moods shift dramatically, from the fresh greens of spring to the riotous yellows and golds of autumn, and finally the skeletal outlines of bare winter branches. These works do not merely record how nature looks; they capture how it feels to live through time, how a single place can contain endless variation. Even his iPad drawings, made on the spot, show a fascination with capturing fleeting changes in light and weather. Hockney transforms the seasons into a kind of visual diary, filled with immediacy, memory, and joy.
Damien Hirst’s relationship to the seasons is less direct, but no less powerful. His monumental Cherry Blossom paintings, created in the late 2010s, are vibrant celebrations of spring. Each vast canvas bursts with thick, textured layers of pink, white and green, recalling trees at their most extravagant moment of bloom. Standing before them, the viewer is overwhelmed by abundance, as though caught in a shower of petals. But embedded within this joy is a reminder of impermanence. Cherry blossoms, after all, are famously fleeting, blooming for only a short time before they fall. In Hirst’s hands, they become symbols of beauty sharpened by brevity, a meditation on life’s cycles of growth and loss. Elsewhere in his work, Hirst has turned to butterflies as natural metaphors of transformation, their delicate wings embodying both renewal and fragility. By arranging them in kaleidoscopic patterns, he fixes their brief existence in time, creating images that, like the seasons, remind us of transience while offering moments of wonder.
Other artists represented at Andipa also engage with seasonal imagery in striking ways. Grayson Perry, for example, often weaves references to time, ritual, and cycles of life into his prints. His works, filled with symbolic detail, can suggest the seasonal turning points of human experience: rites of passage, celebrations, and transformations. In Perry’s visual language, the seasons become part of a broader tapestry of change, linking the natural and the personal. Gary Hume, meanwhile, distils natural forms into flat planes of colour, paring flowers and plants down to their essential outlines. His simplified floral motifs evoke not just individual blooms, but the recurring patterns of nature’s cycle, the abstract beauty of forms that return each year in slightly altered guise. Even Andy Warhol, not an obvious painter of landscapes, touched on the theme of seasonal transformation in his series of Flowers, which, though flattened into Pop Art form, recall the constant renewal of nature and the fleeting brilliance of summer’s colour.
The depiction of seasons in modern and contemporary art speaks to something deeply human: our desire to mark time, to observe its passing, and to find meaning in its cycles. Hockney, in painting Yorkshire through the year, turns seasonal change into a metaphor for continuity, a reassurance that while moments pass, there is always renewal. Hirst, in his blossoms and butterflies, reminds us that beauty is often bound up with impermanence, that life is sweetest when we remember it cannot last forever. Perry, Hume, and Warhol, each in their way, use natural imagery to draw connections between time, memory, and cultural symbols, extending the metaphor of the seasons beyond nature into the human realm. At Andipa Editions, these works bring into the home the rhythms of the outside world, a reminder of change and renewal even in the most static of spaces. A Hockney print from his seasonal series can act like a window onto the countryside, shifting the mood of a room depending on its palette and season. A Hirst blossom print captures the exuberance of spring in a form that can be revisited all year round. A Warhol flower, despite its Pop simplicity, suggests the endless recurrence of life in bloom. These artworks act as companions to time itself, shaping how we see and how we remember.
The enduring appeal of seasonal imagery lies in its universality. Everyone experiences the turning of the year; everyone has memories tied to autumn leaves, spring blossoms, summer light, or winter frost. By engaging with these shared cycles, artists create works that resonate across cultures and eras. At the same time, their approaches reveal how art can transform the familiar into something new; how the same subject, refracted through different sensibilities, can speak in radically different voices. For collectors, the appeal is not only aesthetic but emotional, offering works that are grounded in shared experience yet singular in execution. From Hockney’s joyous landscapes to Hirst’s celebratory yet fragile blossoms, from Perry’s layered symbolism to Warhol’s endlessly repeatable flowers, the seasons continue to provide artists with inexhaustible inspiration. They are not just backdrops but central subjects, mirrors for our own cycles of change. In their hands, the passing of time becomes something to look at, to live with, and to hold onto, even as it slips away. At Andipa Editions, these works remind us that the seasons, like art itself, are both fleeting and eternal, always returning, always renewed, always ready to be seen afresh.
