Picture a bespectacled 75-year-old man finger-painting wee landscapes in the English countryside. Isn’t he sweet? Is he someone’s doddering grandfather? Should we bring him tea and a sandwich?
Now imagine the vessel of his work being not a canvas or a paper sketchbook but an iPad. Upon completing each of his pieces, he emails them off to friends. Even sweeter, yes? And begin to notice the rather consistently stunning aesthetic quality of these images — the draftsmanship, the confidence. He seems not only to comprehend just what it is, that ineffable magic, about the English countryside — or Scandinavian, or Californian — that would incline a person to paint it to begin with, but also the essential nature of the tool with which he works, whereby all-important light comes out at you from beneath a surface instead of bouncing off of it. And consider the possibility that these dainty creations of his may wind up on the cover of the New Yorker, or in several of the world’s most famous museums, because oh, wait, actually, he happens to be David Hockney, an absolute genius and a titan of the art world. Still, some tea might be nice.

David Hockney, Yosemite II, October 5th 2011, iPad Drawing printed on six sheets of paper (71 3/4″ x 35 3/4″ each), c. David Hockney
Hockney has all the endurance and adaptability you could hope for in a pop artist. There’s a gee-whiz factor in his tech-curious ventures, but also a deep and rewarding aesthetic intelligence. Comfortingly, he susses out some possible reconciliation between basic profound nature appreciation and the marauding forward march of technological innovation. Hockney makes it seem like the world we live in now need not be divided against itself.
All of which must be why there’s a huge new show of his work opening at the de Young Museum. It’s literally huge — the largest exhibition in the museum’s history, with some works the size of highway billboards, and it’s called David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition, and it affords you a rare chance to picture several of those iPad illustrations in the breathtaking form of 12-foot-tall, wall-consuming prints. The Yosemite scenes in particular are insouciantly magnificent, and also very well situated within the general context of magnitude.