Exhibition: David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture

If January is starting to get you down, the Royal Academy has the perfect antidote this weekend, with the opening of the David Hockney exhibition: David Hockney: A Bigger Picture. After a few minutes walking round it the other day, I realised I had a big smile on my face. The colours are simply sensational - and the subjects - many of them East Yorkshire skies, country lanes, woods, fields and flowers carefully observed again and again, through the seasons, are a breath of fresh air.

Like the Impressionist artist Claude Monet, who, in his later years, painted the water lilies in his garden more than 250 times. Hockney has become totally engrossed in observing the constant change of nature around him. He says: "Every tree is different. Every single one. The branches, the forces in it; they are marvelously different. You are thrilled. This is the infinity of nature."

Beautifully curated by independent curator Marco Livingstone and Edith Devaney from the Royal Academy, the exhibition includes more than 150 works, alongside related ipad drawings and digital video. Some of his landscapes seem quite simple. But look more closely, seeing them as part of a series and they are anything but. I particularly liked his Thixendale Trees - which illustrate three trees painted from precisely the same spot during the winter and summer of 2007 and the spring and autumn of 2008.

This show is a quite a departure from the earlier landscapes which he did in America. One section is dedicated to these. There are two stunning paintings of Yosemite National where you can almost feel the mist on your face and smell the pine trees. His 1986 Peablossom Highway, on loan from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles really captures the arid atmosphere and sense of speed.

Three groups of new works were made specially for this exhibition. The first is a series inspired by Claude Lorrain's Sermon on the Mount, culminating in the massive A Bigger Message - showing Jesus preaching on a huge outcrop of rock, with a small group around him, a larger group of people and animals underneath with a deep vista of sea, sky and a mountain in the background. The second new work is a huge multiple screen piece using nine and 18 cameras. The exhibition culminates in the largest of the Royal Academy galleries with the Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire 2011 a massive work on 32 canvases surrounded by more than 50 ipad drawings all chronicling the advancing season.

Apparantly Hockney has 'synesthesia' - a condition which makes people see colours when they hear certain sounds or words. As a young artist, when he was commissioned to design sets for ballet and opera, he would listen to the music of the piece as he worked on it. I wonder whether this still affects the way he works.

One thing that does come through from all Hockney's work is the sense that he really loves his subjects - whether he is painting portraits of people or scenes from nature. He might use photography to capture a moment, but in his paintings he is seeking something more profound.

While most people are starting to slow down at 74, David Hockney has produced an amazing new body of work here and it will be interesting to see what he does next.

Born in Bradford in 1937, to Laura and Kenneth Hockney, David Hockney has an older sister, Margaret, who is also an artist. He attended Bradford School of Art before studying at the Royal College of Art from 1959 to 1962. Hockney's stellar reputation was established while he was still a student; his work was featured in the exhibition Young Contemporaries, which heralded the birth of British Pop Art. He visited Los Angeles in the early 1960s and settled there soon after. He is closely associated with southern California and has produced a large body of work there over many decades. David Hockney was elected a Royal Academician in 1991.

Hockney has not spoken much about his personal life or views, but as a young man he was a conscientious objector and did his National Service as as medical orderly. He declined a Knighthood in 1990, but accepted an Order of Merit in January this year.

'David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture' is at the Royal Academy from 21 January to 9 April 2012. It's probably a good idea to book!

For more information see: www.royalacademy.org.uk