David Hockney: A Bigger Picture

It’s a dull day in London. Traffic rolls noisily beneath a pale grey, empty sky. 

The streets are crowded with office workers, slick suits and February’s frowning faces. 

Winding into the Royal Academy is a small queue.

There are old men wearing flat caps and old women, in fancy hats, and the occasional young person, dressed in scruffy, art school stripes.

Coming out of the Royal Academy are smiles. Lots of smiles.

David Hockney’s ‘A Bigger Picture’, it seems, is putting a spring in people’s steps.

The exhibition, showcasing Hockney’s recent work, is a jubilant expression of beauty. Vast and vivid it captures the English countryside -patch work fields and rolling hills.

Huge canvases stretch across white washed walls. Multi-panelled paintings of psychedelic woodlands, emitting their own bright light. 

Spin round the room and you flick through the seasons. Frosty blues and icy greys morph into spring’s pale pinks and summer’s rich yellows.


It is bold and contemporary. Traditional landscape painting with a modern twist. 


In Hockney’s hands technology sparkles. In one gallery giant iPad drawings fill the space. The delicacy with which Hockney has conjured up these digital drawings is incredible. Tiny tracings of a scribbled line, the threads of a brush stroke. It is all there.

Hockney’s film work is just as thrilling –multiple cameras (ingeniously rigged on to his Jeep) move like multiple eyes along leafy country lanes. In creating these shifting, kaleidoscopic jaunts Hockney throws out time frames and plays with perspective. 

Nothing in the exhibition is quiet, nothing sits still; it is alive, excited, exuberant to the point of bursting. 

Blazing oranges, streaks of viridian – straight from the tube, dashes of violet and acid pink swell together, rising in energetic crescendos.

 I’d definitely go again… if the tickets weren’t so expensive.

‘A Bigger Picture’ is on at the Royal Academy until the 9^th April.