In the midst of a pandemic, David Hockney captured the unfolding of spring on his iPad, creating 116 new and optimistic works in praise of the natural world.
We were honoured to be able to help the artist create these on his iPad.
In order to do this, we made Hockney Brushes – an app custom built to his specifications; working with the artist and his assistants to enable him to work in the way he likes.
Aside from giving him the tools to create digital paintings, much effort was made to allow his studio assistants to render these iPad scale paintings at much larger sizes – 16k (and beyond) for the best quality prints at much larger scale. We also gave them the ability to render out animations of every brush stroke, as he created them, to high quality 4k+ videos; really bringing the paintings to life. These have then been used for for shows and enormous immersive installations. They can even view and scale the paintings in AR, direct from the app.
we’re proud to have enabled some of the work featuring in the immersive exhibition at Lightroom, Kings Cross, London: David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)
For this, we added two extra features to the app/s:
– A new “grid composition” view and creation tool.
– Batch exporting of high definition 4k video tiles/paintings, which capture every brush stroke being redrawn, and hence a viewer can watch the piece come to life from an empty canvas.