One of the reasons that David Hockney has kept the attention of the art world is that he's open to trying new things.
For a while, he experimented with Polaroid pictures taking advantage of the fact that for a short time after the picture came out of the camera you could squish and squash it to distort the image.
Now the 73-year-old has been using his iPhone and an app called Brushes to create original artwork.
The New York Review of Books reported in 2009, "Over the past six months, Hockney has fashioned literally hundreds, probably over a thousand, such images, often sending out four or five a day to a group of about a dozen friends, and not really caring what happens to them after that."
It quoted Hockney talking about this new medium: "It’s always there in my pocket, there’s no thrashing about, scrambling for the right color. One can set to work immediately, there’s this wonderful impromptu quality, this freshness, to the activity; and when it’s over, best of all, there’s no mess, no clean-up. You just turn off the machine. Or, even better, you hit Send, and your little cohort of friends around the world gets to experience a similar immediacy. There’s something, finally, very intimate about the whole process."
If you happen to be in Paris at the moment you can see an exhibition of some of these works on 40 screens--20 iPhones and 20 iPads at the Berge-St. Laurent Foundation.
More importantly, I think this demonstrates an open mindedness that keeps an artist young in spirit. ...What new idea or method can you play with to create your creativity?
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