David Hockney’s 220 pandemic paintings

Image credit - LA Times article and  image 

David Hockney went to his home in the Normandy, France countryside for the pandemic.  And he created art every day.  

The artist would generally get up with the sun, sometimes as early as 5 a.m. in the summer, and draw on his iPad. It took about a day and a half to do each painting, he said, “and I worked every day of the year. I’d go out and look for something to draw here, which I always found.”

Check out the series of images to Hockney's right.  It's a "panorama" of his home. image

“I began with drawing the bare trees in March, and in April the first blossoms came out, and I drew that,” he said. “Then there were more blossoms, and the leaves began to grow. Then the blossoms would fall off, and you’d have just the leaves. Eventually, the leaves would fall off and it would be autumn.

His goal has been to make 220 paintings on his iPad in 2020.  One hundred and sixteen of the iPad drawings, covering the period from late February to July, will be printed out “rather big” for the Royal Academy of Arts show at the end of March.

I loved this image from the article and what it conjures for me about how he lives his life:

Hockney has no television, but he always has read a great deal. He has books sent to him, and he’s currently reading “For the Love of Music: A Conductor’s Guide to the Art of Listening,” by John Mauceri. Besides rereading Marcel Proust, he’s recently read Gustave Flaubert’s novel “Sentimental Education,” George Eliot’s novel “Middlemarch” and stories by Guy de Maupassant. (“Look up his marvelous story ‘Moonlight,’” Hockney urged.)

This spring he sent this image to Art Newspaper along with the message: "Do Remember They Can't Cancel Spring."