Hockney completes four massive paintings of a particular view, Three Trees near Thixendale, begun in 2007, each in a different season.

I thought I’d do them in August because the trees looked majestic to me. I realized they were about 200 years old each. In the winter you wouldn’t notice them much …. In the summer it’s just the largeness, the weight it seems to have; the branches are bending because of the weight of the foliage. In December they are reaching for the light. So once you’ve done the second one, you think, “Well, when spring comes along, and it’s changing, I’ll do another.” So I did. The spring was quite hard, because spring happens very quickly here. We call it “action week.”