Are These iPad Paintings ‘Very Remarkable’ or ‘Quite Bad?’ [Art]

David Hockney , the English painter known for his pop art and technological experimentation, has beamed more than 300 iPad drawings to an ongoing exhibition in Paris. This act has been more controversial than you have got guessed!

” Very unremarkable… some are quite bad ,” writes former Big Apple Times web design director Khoi Vinh. ” Garbage ” is the verdict of Choire Sicha, the Awl co-editor and former art dealer.

But as The Atlantic reminds us , Hockney has been toying with tech tools for decades, including 1980s graphics programs and something called ” FAX art.” And there are some practical benefits to his tablet use: ” The iPad’s backlight permits you to paint at any time of day, the app’s color wheel provides every pigment, and its very nature renders set-up and clean-up obsolete.” The iPad also lets Hockney do most of his painting in bed. With another Apple device he was ready to quickly render a scene of dawn breaking breaking across the North Sea, when it normally ” can be too dark to work out the paints.”

Even Sicha concedes the ” marvelous and awesome and unexpected” aspect of this work, as does Vinh. But conceding the fantastic possibilities inherent in iPad paintings can make Hockney’s stuff seem each of the more dim. Vinh:

Someone like David Hockney, you’d expect, can be ready to show us entirely new worlds… on a device like the iPad. Instead the works in ” Fresh Flowers” are faint echoes of a worldwide we already know.

Or to position it within the words of native iPad critics: ” One star/Does not recommend/’Lots of potential, weak execution’.”

[iPad paintings via The Atlantic . Click image to expand]

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This post is tagged: david hockney, dawn breaking, design director, english painter, fresh flowers, graphics programs, technological experimentation