Is spring our most hopeful, most wished-for, most undeniably complex season? We rush towards it wildly, and it slaughters our hopes with false fits and starts, and then finally, when ready, it arrives: full-on buzzing, humming chaos. A flowering bud then blooming madness, a whisp of glee and long-gone sadness. Stretching muscles hitherto sore, we run towards spring in all its lore. 

In 2020, however, biology had different plans. The pandemic had other plans. Visiting upon humans a dirge of life and death. Death of lives hopes, and all the other beautiful expectations of beauty and freedom we shove into spring.

And yet, under this restrictive burden, then 82-year-old David Hockney (Born July 9, 1937), an artistic polymath who has produced art for longer than most of us have taken breath, produced one hundred and sixteen large canvas paintings of spring. Together with the Royal Academy of Arts, Hockney made The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020, a warm, bright, abundant book filled (to this writer's delight!) with flowering trees, as witnessed by Hockney.

David Hockney in his Normandy studio, 24th February 2021. Photograph by Jonathan Wilkinson.

Born in England, Hockey has spent most of his life in California. For Arrival of Spring, he painted from Normandy, a humble place in northern Europe (i.e., a seasonal geography) that allowed the artist to return to the same horizons, and trees to chronicle season shifts. "If I had stayed in LA I'd have been doing something else, but I couldn't have been doing this." he confided.

I realized to show the full arrival of spring, you have to start in the winter and go into the summer a bit, and then you see all the differences and all the rich things that happen to each tree. The first spring I'd seen for years was in 2002 when I was posing for Lucian Freud and I walked up Holland Park from the bottom to the top every morning at eight o'clock and I realised that spring was happening and it was fantastic. I realized I hadn't seen one for twenty years - I mean, they do have a spring in California, you get the flowers in the desert, the change of flower, but you don't get the dramatic change from winter trees to summer trees and everything that happens in between.

Imagine living in a location that does not have spring like you are used to. In either direction, more or less, it would compel one to capture the drama in as many art forms as possible.

There are four acres of land with this little Seven Dwarfs house in the middle and a little river at the bottom, just hedges on either side, rather big trees at the top by the road, and I've never left it much at all. I have absolutely everything I need. Each year is different because each year the trees start at different times. Last year, the cherry trees came out first and then the pear trees; this year the pear trees came out first and then the cherry trees. There's no set date when it begins, and you don't know which trees will begin first, even if you'd been here forty years. But it is exciting if you're watching it, as I am. Very exciting. It begins with absolutely nothing on the branches and they end up covered in leaves.

 No. 641, 27th November 2020. iPad painting.

 Close-up of No. 41, 11th February 2020. iPad painting.

As he has done throughout his career, Hockey has an open-minded understanding of how technology can amplify and expand art, "I think like a painter on the iPad now," Hockney explained. " Using an iPad and the most updated version of the app Brushes, Hockney created a canvas daily, the individual marks, lines, and figures drawn by iPad pen as if it were a brush with paint.

 Close-up of No. 125, 19th March 2020. iPad painting.

 Close-up of No. 164, 5th April 2020. iPad painting.

Hockney even worked with colour mixing and shading to find the just-right spring green.

You get one colour and you might try it and then you think, no, it should be a tiny bit darker or a tiny bit more bright, and then you do it. Well that's like painting. You might put a bit of colour on first, and when there's a lot of it you think, yes. That's what I'm doing all the time, getting greens. I mean the green of the spring is a luscious fresh green that's gone by about June, but April and May have this very, very fresh green, and you need a few greens; you've got to use a few greens. It's a difficult colour but we can see more greens than any other color. That must be because we used to have to search for food. I mean, something going back a long way, something deep in us.

 No.s 175, 180, 225, and 296 done in April and May 2020. iPad painting.

 No.s 288, 322, done in May 2020. iPad painting.

 No. 169, 5th April 2020. iPad painting.

Hockney had planned to 'capture spring,' in a collection of work on the iPad, but the pandemic changed circumstances, making the work both more accessible and necessary: "Having no visitors was a boon to me...We got on fine." With the help of his assistants, Hockney could move his chair and table, equipped with a small propped top, around the farm's acreage and be en plein air almost daily. He captured the same trees in different states of spring dress while the remainder of the world was indoors.

 No. 124, 18th March 2020. iPad painting.

 No. 308, 14th February 2020. iPad painting.

 No. 88, March 2020. iPad painting.

 No.s 195 and 257 done on 3rd March 2020 & 4th May 2020. iPad painting.

 No. 142, 27th March 2020. iPad painting.

 No. 181, 10th April 2020. iPad painting.

Painting daily, and recording the change of spring, not merely its existence, makes Hockney's The Arrival of Spring a witness of the spring of 2020. Yet, in depicting nature, the artwork remains utterly indifferent to everything else happening. Nature is transcendent, observed Ralph Waldo Emerson almost two hundred years ago, the act of creating can have a similar effect.

Hockney continues:

I go out, sit, and draw, and I'd just lose myself. I'd draw for there or four hours sometimes, and then I'd come in and I'd maybe go to bed at 8:30 pm, and I'd even go on drawing on the iPad in bed because that is all you need.

 No. 247, 26th April 2020. iPad painting.

 No. 327, 16th May 2020. iPad painting.

 No. 133, 23rd March 2020. iPad painting

As we slide into spring, the cruelest time, the memory of the pandemic vivid, it all slips into something beautiful when I turn the pages of The Arrival of Spring. Under all that thudding weight of expectation and memory, someone - who just so happened to be David Hockney - ventured out every day and noticed every bud, every bloom, every leaf nub, bark softening, every changing minute that is spring, and captured it for us. He even sat up in bed to finish.

Toni Morrison once considered art the most appropriate response to chaos. While Hockney formed his screen paints, Zadie Smith wrote about connections in a time of social distancing, Jan Enkelmann took photographs of an empty but luminous city, and Gary Bunt drew tender illustrations of a man and his best friend. Even now, who makes art?

All images are ⓒ David Hockney OM CH RA, quoted text from an interview with David Hockney and Edith Devaney, included courtesy of Royal Academy of Arts, 2021.