David Hockney's landscapes

THERE'S something profoundly enchanting about the English landscape. Ancient rolling hills receding to infinity. Gnarly trees like sagacious, wizened old men, weathering time as they silently witness history. Seductive, ariot and vivacious, full of light and life. David Hockney captures some of this in his new show at the Royal Academy. Some of it he misses.

Presenting over 150 works inspired by the Yorkshire countryside, "A Bigger Picture" is just that. Like his nemesis Damien Hirst, David Hockney enjoys scale. He likes to paint a very large landscape. So much so one feels it would be churlish not to revel in the grandiosity of it. "The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in Twenty-Eleven" (pictured top) measures a staggering 365.8 x 975.4 cm, is made up of 32 canvases and is surrounded by more than 50 large-scale preparatory sketches composed on Mr Hockney's iPad and printed onto paper. This one painting fills the largest and grandest of all of the Royal Academy's many beautiful rooms. Once one's spoken of its magnitude, though, there isn't a great deal else to say, beyond the observation that this is a very nice painting full of lovely colours. Somehow, despite it all, that doesn't feel like quite enough.

Most of the works on display were created in the last eight years. Fortunately, the show introduces us to its theme by way of Mr Hockney's very earliest landscapes. Now 74, the adored grandfather of British painting is as firmly established in the canon of art history as the unwavering purple-tree stump of "Winter Timber" (2009) is into the earth (pictured below). Back in the day, though, he was quite the wild thing. His early work has that elusive power, the raw edge of passion and urgency that circumnavigates the stultifying effects of the ego and the over-thinking mind and spills forth straight from the heart, opening itself to greatness.

One of the first paintings we come across is "Ordinary Picture" (1964). As it happens, this is the least ordinary painting in the exhibition. Rather it is exquisite, ethereal in its handling of colour and form. This is Mr Hockney's palette at its most delicate, before the subtle tonalities of nature were bulldozed by the harshness of will. Rather than challenging nature, as his more recent work is wont to do, "Ordinary Picture" submits to it with humility. Perhaps then the title is a telling projection, an eloquent tribute to the pleasures of the everyday rather than a desire to transcend.

From here the show begins to lumber forward, a marathon runner not quite prepared for the full distance. For this is a large show, very large indeed for a body of work spanning little more than eight years (though it includes a number of earlier landscapes dating from the 1950s). One wonders if the resources were quite sufficient for the task. But, “I'm rather confident,” says Mr Hockney in advance of the show's opening, “rather confident it'll be fresh as well, a lot of new things in it and a lot of new ideas about pictures, including television, including cameras.”

Mr Hockney is keen to embrace technology, dedicating a whole room to nine and 18 screen videos of nature and, somewhat randomly, dancers in his studio. But this falls flat, an uninteresting documentary rejoicing in its own technical complexity at the expense of intellectual or poetic content. Similarly, the iPad sketches cry to the world that age is no obstacle to cutting-edge dynamism. The result is quite the opposite. The media is not engaged on its own terms, so its output is as jejune as the app that made it. In Mr Hockney's skilled hands a pencil or a box of watercolours would have done a far better job. But perhaps there wasn't the time for that.

The work is segregated thematically: Tunnels, Hawthorn Blossoms, Trees and Totems, The Arrival of Spring and so on. Nature is clearly the theme here. But I can't help wondering whether the real theme is Mr Hockney's ego, with nature trailing in a poor second.

This exhibition could have been outstanding if it had been in a space a quarter of the size, with an eighth of the content, produced over double the time. As it is I'm reminded of an insightful observation spoken by the artist himself: “We grow small trying to be great.”

Read more: David Hockney, national treasure