In 2009, the artist David Hockney started drawing with his thumbs on his iPhone. Then, the following year, when the iPad came out, he started using that, often drawing with a stylus pen. “There was great advantage in this medium because it’s backlit and I could draw in the dark. I didn’t ever have to get out of bed,” Hockney writes in his new book of iPad drawings, My Window, out this month from Taschen.
The book is a collection of the iPhone and iPad drawings Hockney made of the view from his bedroom in Bridlington, East Yorkshire, between 2009 and 2012. “From about April to August when the sun is in the north, if I didn’t pull the curtains or lower the venetian blind down, the sun would wake me up—at about 4:30 a.m.,” he writes. “I would never have thought to do a sunrise without the iPhone.”
See more of Hockney’s sunrises, flowers, and seasonal scenes from his window below.