Back to his roots

Like Constable, David Hockney has returned to the countryside of his youth. In Bridlington, not far from Bradford, the city of his birth, he has in recent years discovered the sea at his door and the pleasure of capturing the four seasons, reproducing the Yorkshire Wolds on paper, in oil and also on his iPhone and iPad.

After over 20 years in California, the 75-year-old painter loves the way time seems to stand still around here. Traveling the deserted highways he discovered there were few signs, fewer cars and not a single electricity pylon: "I can take enormous canvases, I never bump into anyone," he recently told critic Martin Gayford. "I can paint in complete peace. I enjoy this small corner of England a lot."

The fruit of this newfound inspiration is A Bigger Picture, the exhibition previously on show at the Royal Academy in London and now at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

Few times has an artist delivered as much as Hockney does in this extensive, and comprehensive, show. In over 190 works he experiments with technique, light, color, sensations and the memories that have marked his life since childhood.

Trees are the most powerful manifestation of life force; no two are the same, like people"

To prepare it, Hockney rented a huge warehouse in Bridlington and filled it with wheelchairs, so his collaborators could move around without having to stride about the place. Under uniform light, he practiced the pleasure of looking. His big theme: none other than "the infinite variety of nature."

He worked for four years, as if training for a marathon. As soon as dawn broke, he'd head to the byways nearest to Bridlington in a 4x4, driven by his assistant. He painted the changes of the seasons in the trees and the landscape without stopping. New technologies were his stimulus. First it was the iPhone and now the iPad. And observing the trees is once again making him quiver with emotion. "[They're] the most powerful manifestation of life force we can contemplate," he says. "No two are the same, like people."

The show is a succession of trees - dense, tall and also cut down. One of the works in the series, The Tunnel, shows a forest trail flanked by trees and bushes that become a herbaceous walkway when they blossom, a succession of instants touched by the climate. He painted it for the first time in 2005, stubbornly returning to it time and again.

But if there is a great painting in the show, it is The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven). It is an installation composed of 32 canvases, surrounded by 51 drawings made on an iPad and printed on paper. It records the transition from winter until the end of spring, on a small path, in Yorkshire.

David Hockney: A Bigger Picture. Until September 30 at Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, Avenida Abandoibarra 2, Bilbao. www.guggenheim-bilbao.es