The countryside of the Yorkshire Wolds is unspectacular and subtle. It is also unspoilt, Hockney's corner of it being on the road to nowhere: it is a place where he can bring his preoccupations together. Although Hockney came to prominence with the Pop Art movement he never belonged to it — he has never been co-opted to any movement or group. Nor has abstraction ever enticed him. As the art critic Martin Gayford relates in his revealing new book, A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney (Thames & Hudson, £18.95), abstraction, thinks Hockney, "can't go anywhere. Even [Jackson] Pollock's painting is a dead end." The alternative he has chosen is heightened naturalism. 

Bridlington offers landscape that is in the real sense grounded — no breathtaking vistas such as his Grand Canyon pictures of the late 1990s, nothing to prod the imaginary such as his opera backdrops. It is instead a place where he can paint "for 24 hours a day. Nothing else occupies your mind, other than at your choice." It has inspired an extraordinary burst of creativity.

In the early 1980s Hockney made composite pictures — "joiners" as he called them — out of numerous Polaroid snaps of a subject rearranged as a mosaic to form a new whole; he has adapted the technique for his new work. He takes a motif — a stand of trees, a lane between fields, a pile of cut timber — and examines it not through one canvas but by painting it across multiple canvases, creating pictures of huge size that almost become landscapes themselves. It is a technical solution to the problem of seeing landscape painting afresh and of getting the capaciousness he wants as an "agoraphiliac" into a medium that is traditionally small scale.