A bigger picture

David Hockney RA has just completed his biggest ever painting, a vast open-air landscape. Martin Gayford visits him in Yorkshire to ask how he did it, and why he thinks art should engulf us

On Good Friday this year, in the company of a small group of travellers, I went to visit a warehouse on an industrial estate in Bridlington, East Yorkshire. The object of our pilgrimage was not this nondescript structure but the painting that it briefly sheltered. There, on the far wall, hung the largest picture that David Hockney RA has ever created – perhaps the most sizeable ever to be painted in the open air. This was a first for the artist, who had never before seen his entire work assembled together.

David Hockney RA at work on ‘Bigger Trees near Warter’ © David Hockney 2007/Photo Jean-Pierre Goncalves

The painting is massive. It is made of 50 small canvases, adding up to an area measuring 40-foot wide by 15-foot high. The subject is what you might call the ordinary English countryside: a small copse of trees, with another in the background, and one large sycamore in front, spreading its network of branches above your head. To the right is a house, to the left a road curves away. In the foreground, a few daffodils bloom. The work is the solution to a problem that perplexed and defeated many of the great painters of the nineteenth century: how do you paint a mighty canvas outside, en plein air? To make the work, Hockney has employed the most up-todate digital technology, in addition to the most old-fashioned – the human hand, arm and eye.

Hockney looking at part of the completed work for the first time in a warehouse in Bridlington © David Hockney 2007/Photo Jean-Pierre Goncalves

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