David Hocknet is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century and an important contributor to the 1960s’ Pop Art movement. He’s now doing paintings on his iPad. The only problem? Many commenters think they’re junk.
The controversy sparked up after Hockney emailed 300 iPad drawings to an exhibition in Paris, with former New York Times web director Khoi Vinh going as far as to say they are “very unremarkable.”
That said, the iPad appears to be a revolutionary tool for the tech-inclined Hockney, mainly in that it allows him to paint at any time of the day and employ the full spectrum of the color wheel. For example, he was able to paint the dawn breaking over the North Sea, even though with conventional painting equipment, it would all be “too dark to see the paints.”
In other words, the iPad is actually a great artist’s canvas… but that doesn’t mean that every resulting work’s a gem.
