To do landscapes, you’ve got to know the place rather well. You’ve got to love it, actually. You’ve got to know where the sun will be. In the summer I should be out at six in the morning, because if it’s sunny the light from six to nine is magic. Of course, to paint in the winter, you’ve got to prepare yourself. You need thick clothing and things. I mean we often looked like Michelin men. The first winter I spent here I began to see how beautiful the winters were. There was far more color than I expected. Occasionally a farmer would come and talk to me. They didn’t think I exaggerated the color. They thought my paintings were very accurate, and talking to them I noticed that they knew just how beautiful it is here.

In February, L.A. Louver in Los Angeles exhibits the 36 watercolors entitled Midsummer: East Yorkshire in a show of Hockney’s watercolors, Hand, Eye, Heart. David Pagel reviews the show for the Los Angeles Times: “You don’t have to know much about David Hockney or watercolor painting to see that the artist’s 55 new works are amazing documents of rambling drives through the English countryside. Each casually exquisite picture of leafless trees, golden fields, puddled lanes, blossoming flowers, distant farmhouses, rolling hillsides, and quiet towns is an astutely observed moment that would never make it to a postcard but is all the more lovely for being ordinary. In these enlivened images glimpsed through car windows, Hockney doesn’t take your breath away so much as he gets you to breathe deeply, soaking in every detail of the fleeting scenes.” Back in Bridlington as of July, Hockney continues painting the Yorkshire landscape en plein air, but now in oil.