Artist David Hockney’s iPad and iPhone artwork goes on display at the de Young Museum

SAN FRANCISCO — David Hockney and his iPad have turned much of the de Young Museum’s exhibition space into an 18,000-square-foot jewel box, its walls shimmering with colors and forms created on his Apple palette, the brush strokes laid down by finger and thumb.

The show, which opens Saturday and runs until January 20, is called “David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition” for good reason: it’s the biggest show the San Francisco museum has ever put on, it’s the first comprehensive display of the world-acclaimed British artist’s recent work, and it’s very, very big on art spawned by those thin and shiny tablets from Cupertino.

“I was drawing on the iPhone first, using my thumb,” the 76-year-old artist said Thursday during a private event at the museum. “But from the moment the first iPad was announced, I got one straight away. It’s a new medium, and it’s much more interesting than using Photoshop on a computer, because it’s quicker. You can pick up one color and change it for another color and go back and forth very, very fast.”

Of course, he added with a sly grin, “You do need to know a little bit about drawing, too.”

Hockney certainly does. Born in England in 1937, he has honed his skills over the decades in painting as well as drafting, printmaking, stage design and photography. Splitting his time now between Los Angeles and London, he has assumed a lofty status around the world as one of the most important living artists and a key player in the Pop Art movement of the 1960s.

Along the way, from paintbrush to camera to fax machine and now to smartphones and tablets, Hockney has remained hipper than ever.

“David is so up-to-date on everything,” said longtime Los Angeles journalist Joan Agajanian Quinn, who said she’s known Hockney for 40 years and that he “painted me just last week using an iPad. His iPad pieces are very cool; he makes modern technology ‘painterly.”’

The de Young show comes on the heels of a successful exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. And while the show features nearly 400 paintings, drawings and even video pieces using multiple cameras, it is the 147 works produced on his iPad and iPhone that are likely to seduce most museumgoers.

The iPad art — created with an app called Brushes that allows a user to “paint” on the tablet’s screen, render different effects and draw from a whole spectrum of colors and gradations — fills three rooms of the exhibition. One piece, called “From Pixels to Print,” features scores of digitally produced drawings that cycle through on seven LED screens on the wall. Some show Hockney’s process by revealing the various stages of a single drawing, as the artist’s invisible thumb and finger brush in swaths of color to a pastoral scene or flesh out flowers in a vase.

“His use of the iPad,” says the exhibition’s recorded tour guide, “has gone way beyond sketching on a screen to becoming a core part of his creative process.”

In a nearby gallery entitled “Looking Up,” the walls are filled with 12-foot-high prints of five views of Yosemite that Hockney created during a visit to the park. During Thursday’s onstage conversation with Richard Benefield, deputy director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and organizer of the exhibition, Hockney talked about the “printing revolution” underway and how impressed he was by the conversion of his iPad drawings of Yosemite into massive prints.

“I was a bit amazed by them,” he said, speaking slowly and haltingly. “I’m still amazed by them.”

The prominence of the Apple devices in the show underscore Hockney’s longtime embrace and mastery of a whole spectrum of artist’s tools. “Like an artist alchemist,” Benefield writes, “in one minute Hockney uses a fancy digital device to make a colorful iPad drawing; in the next he shows us that he is one of our greatest draftsmen by rendering an exactingly detailed charcoal drawing of a forest scene in East Yorkshire.”

Hockney is hardly alone in his embrace of digital painting tools. Artists like Michaela Bartonova, a world-renowned acrylic artist and watercolorist from the Czech Republic, uses an iPad app called Paper to do live-sketches of stage sets in London where actors perform interactively with the images on a large screen behind them.

“People are looking for a more interactive experience with art, and the iPad provides the perfect medium,” says Georg Petschnigg, co-founder and CEO of New York-based startup FiftyThree, whose Paper was featured as the iPad App of the Year in 2012. “Ever since the world realized that the iPad was not simply for consumption, millions and millions of people have downloaded apps like ours that make it easy to sketch and use watercolors digitally. Never underestimate how creative people can be when they use these new tools.”

But whether the art is rendered with pencil, brush or an iPad 4, Hockney says his goal is to pull back the curtain blocking our view of what’s really going on out there.

“My aim is to show people the world, I guess,” he said. “You see things in a picture. Otherwise, people scan what’s in front of them but they don’t really look very hard at the world. Well, I do, and I do something with it.”

And that, said Hockney with his iPad-rendered take on Yosemite Valley splayed behind him across a giant screen, “is why you need artists.”

Contact Patrick May at 408-920-5689 or follow him at Twitter.com/patmaymerc.