Originally published in print March 2021.
At the end of 2020, The New Yorker published an article on painter and printmaker David Hockney, who made the cover art ‘Hearth’ for their December issue. His recent works are scattered at intervals throughout the text. They are vibrant and profound. The most fascinating part? 83-year-old Hockney has ‘painted’ them on his iPad. Art has evolved an enormous amount in the last ten years, but with technological progress come increasingly pressing questions about creativity in the 21st century.
Painting, as a visual art practice, has largely remained unchanged over time. The fact that it is the sum of paper, paint and paintbrush is clear to us. However, these three elements have gradually been converted into digital replications, in the now-defunct Paint application and newer applications like Procreate. The effect of ‘brushstrokes’ in Procreate, for example, is not unrealistic. Hockney himself has made use of the original Brushes app, calling it ‘the best’, and even has six custom ‘brushes’ on his personal illustration app. He claims that the works he has made on his iPad are ‘paintings’ – but are they, really?
All of the elements line up, and yet, something does not quite click. Digital tools have unconsciously been reserved for practices like illustration and graphic design. Painting has remained within physical art-making. There is the sense that this medium requires a healthy dose of serendipity in its process. It is unreliable in that paint may splatter or you may not achieve the colour you want. Oil painting is the most forgiving form of painting, and even then, changing a black background to white is not a piece of cake. Digital painting, on the other hand, allows you to make all brushstrokes exactly the same colour, and shape, and size, and then change them completely later. In Hockney’s work, which verges on pop art pointillism, each ‘brushstroke’ dot is identical. While we know that digital art can reflect an artist’s style, there is also a certain degree of uniformity. As Zach from Gilmore Girls famously says, ‘it’s very not rock n’ roll’.
But this view of digital art is reductionist and close-minded. Hockney was never a ‘traditional’ painter. There has always been a vein of anarchy in his works, from the unsettlingly stylised landscapes to the acidic colour palette. Hockney’s most famous work, ‘The Bigger Splash’ (1967), might as well have been created on an iPad. His style may have even influenced corporate art styles. Ultimately, though, the difference between artistic mediums is not all that significant nowadays. Yayoi Kusama’s dotted installations are incredibly systematic despite their manual creation. Experiential installations such as ones by teamLab are computer-generated. Art is meant to be subversive, and is very much rooted in the interactivity of mediums. The use of digital tools may have more to do with an artist’s inclination for sleek outlines and precision, as a more effective way of expressing their vision, than a rejection of chance creativity.
The question ‘Are Hockney’s digital works still paintings?’, has turned into the broader question, ‘What is art?’, in one swell swoop. Perhaps, digital painting is shocking precisely because it makes us revaluate the nature of art, sending a formerly liberating form into the clutches of technological conformity. Or perhaps this outcome goes to show how irrelevant and pointless it is to debate labels in the ever-expanding art realm. I’ll leave you to draw (or paint) your own conclusions.
Featured art: In the Studio (2019) by David Hockney, Inkjet print on paper.
