Spring in the air as new Hockney iPad works unveiled

The prints depicting The Arrival of Spring on Woldgate - a prehistoric route near Bridlington which Hockney repeatedly painted during his years on the East Coast - are going on show at Salts Mill from today.

Drawn on an ipad, which the artist said allowed him to work far faster than using watercolour, each of the 33 images depicts a day between January 1 and May 31 2011.

Salts Mill, which was renovated by the late Jonathan Silver, a friend of the artist, is already home to the largest collection of Hockney’s artwork in the world and is run by members of the Silver family

Zoe Silver said the third floor gallery would give people the space to look at the images exhibited at the hugely popular Royal Academy show in London in 2012, and at the same time they could look outside and see Spring arriving on the moors.

She said: “They are just absolutely gorgeous pictures, very hopeful and exuberant. They really do bear a lot of looking. If you come up close some look almost 3D and when we were unpacking them what struck me was there are so many stylistic differences - there’s one with tiny dots which is almost pointillistic.

“I wouldn’t have figured that out when they were double-height in a massive rooms with lots of people.”

Mrs Silver said they would be e-mailing the artist, who is now based in LA, to show him how the latest hanging.

She added: “He always says there’s a great pleasure to be looking very closely. It’s what artists do and he does brilliantly. He has made the definitive record of the area, it hasn’t been immortalised in art before.

“What he is saying is the whole world is really beautiful - look hard.”

Opening also today is People and Princes, a new gallery also on the third floor, devoted to the history of Salts Mill. It tells the story of Salts through objects great and small, including a plate from the lavish opening banquet of 1853.