The most striking example is Bigger Trees Near Warter, painted in 2007 for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. It is a Brobdingnagian picture 40 ft wide and 15 ft high and composed of 50 canvases. He painted it outside over the course of six weeks, working by the side of the road and using digital technology to keep the whole enterprise in perspective as he worked on each individual rectangle. It is the biggest en plein air picture ever painted and he needed a specially-adapted car with racks to hold the numerous canvases. He would rise at dawn each day to make the most of the still limited spring daylight. The effect of the picture is unnerving; it can been viewed as a single entity or broken down into its parts, each of its 50 pieces being a single pixel or television screen or jigsaw piece. He has subsequently donated the picture to the Tate, no mean act of philanthropy since an earlier large landscape, A Bigger Grand Canyon, sold for $4.6 million.
Hockney's experiments with these painted "joiners" continue. Where Bigger Trees uses a fairly conventional palette some of his more recent works have a less naturalistic colour scheme with Matisse-like swathes of purple and turquoise dominant. And he has not been able to shake off his longstanding fascination with the camera. Photography, he told Gayford, has "made us all see in a rather similar boring way" and although he uses the camera as a tool "that little bit by which it misses makes it miss by a mile. That's what I grope at." In order to capture the bit of reality that has slipped through the gaps he is now experimenting with a bank of nine or more car-mounted high-definition cameras that simultaneously film the landscape as he drives slowly through and which are then played back on a bank of screens. It is as if Hockney has decided to be a fly's eye and project the different images received through each optical facet.
When it comes to art, though, Hockney has always been a fully-fledged technophile. He has made pictures with fax machines and photocopiers and was an early adopter of the iPhone, though not for talking on but as an electronic sketchpad. The same is true with the iPad; friends will often wake up to find a drawing (or several) he has done on it, of flowers or the table in front of his window, waiting in their inbox.
