David Hockney's purple trees

I went to see the new  David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy last week and in a way all I want to say is, 'Go and see it! It's amazing!'

But that's not terribly thoughtful or reflective. Maybe I find it hard to think of something careful to say because Hockney's new paintings have such an immediate impact - I didn't stand there thinking about them, dissecting his technique, or his repeated symbols of roads and hills, though they're there to be considered. I simply relished the experience of looking - it felt as though Hockney and I had set out on a sunny day on our bikes to explore the East Yorkshire landscape, and whenever we saw something beautiful or surprising, we'd stop, and while I looked at the view, he'd whip out his paints and capture it then and there.

In the exhibition there's one wall of thirty or so pictures, hung en masse - they cover the wall, and they're brilliant, in the sense of shining out at you. The colours are bright, vibrant, and often not at all realistic - but they are what you see when you're out there in a landscape. Hockney has painted the landscape we see, not its photographic image - and that's why I stood and simply grinned in recognition at his painting of Garrowby Hill, with its unfeasible drop and crimson fields - and why the log pile in Winter Timber is perfect in orange, next to its purple tree trunk.

By co-incidence, but proving Hockney's genius perfectly, a couple of days before I saw the Hockney, I took some photos in my own Wealden landscape.
 

They're pretty accurate - it was a cold day, mist was hanging in the bottoms, lining the hillsides. They're not bad pictures - but they in no way capture the joy of being there in the landscape. That's what Hockney does. His paintings are all about that feeling in your gut when you turn a corner and there's the stump of a tree sitting in a flash of sunlight - or when you puff up a hill, turn round at the top and look back down at the vast space laid out below you - or when you walk the same lane every day, and know every bush and every clump of grass, and the day the hazel catkins open, you smile because spring's on its way.

I bought some postcards from the exhibition to remind me of how happy it made me. I could never afford a Hockney for my own wall - I'll just have to look at my postcards and go for a walk instead.