David Hockney and the iPhone

For the last few weeks, I have been having a wonderful time on a fine art forum on the internet. Everyone there is very friendly and helpful and mostly, they use traditional materials in their artwork – oils, acrylics and pastels. Today, I ‘came out’ as it were and admitted that our artwork was iPhoneography.

As I typed the very word, I imagined a collective shudder from the group. You remember I said that the artists there are helpful and friendly? One lady let me know that David Hockney has created iPhone art. I had no idea. Not iPhoneography, but art actually created in his phone.  He is quoted as saying:

‘It’s always there in my pocket, there’s no thrashing about, scrambling for the right color. One can set to work immediately, there’s this wonderful impromptu quality, this freshness, to the activity; and when it’s over, best of all, there’s no mess, no clean-up. You just turn off the machine. Or, even better, you hit Send, and your little cohort of friends around the world gets to experience a similar immediacy. There’s something, finally, very intimate about the whole process’.

Exactly! Such a similar philosophy to Andy’s capture and share the moment.

Then I got this ‘da da da da da da da da’ moment. (That’s the theme tune to the Twilight Zone, by the way). My old hippie side reared up and whispered ‘karma’ into my ear. You see, David Hockney was born, and still lives, in Yorkshire, England, the very place Andy and I are from. Now he lives in Bridlington, a place both of us went to on holiday when we were kids. (And that stretch of coast is the best place to get fish and chips).

Apparently, the locals  there found out about his iPhone art and said “Hello, now you’re making art on your iPhone, eh?” (Actually it would have been “Ayup, na tha’s mekkin art on thi iPhone is tha?”) To which Hockney would reply ‘Well, no, actually, it’s just that occasionally I speak on my sketch pad.”

Which has sent my old hippie side back to where she came from and the Yorkshire side, who is much louder and much more vocal, yelled “Yes! David Hockey and Andy Royston! Two pioneer iPhone Yorkshire artists. Yorkshire rules!”