Vibrant Tate show traces David Hockney's artistic journey

For curators of a major retrospective opening this week at Tate Britain , Hockney is an innovator whose 60-year career has taken in sketching, painting, printmaking, photography and digital iPad experiments.

To the tabloid, he's a British icon, a "Yorkshire working-class lad made good," famous for his round glasses, shock of blond hair (now gray) and contempt for smoking bans and other governmental intrusions.

Hockney's iPad drawings fill the final room of the exhibition, which encompasses some 250 works: drawings, paintings in acrylic and oil, photo collages and videos.

Wilson said Hockney has spent his career trying to answer a fundamental question: "How do you as an artist represent the world of three and four dimensions, feeling and emotion, on a two-dimensional surface?"

Instead of producing single photographs, which Hockney has dismissed as "looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops," he combined scores of photos into multi-perspective collages of landscapes.

In the early 2000s he looked afresh at the fields and forests of Yorkshire in a series of exuberant landscape paintings that combined bold color with minute attention to the texture of snow on a hillside or blossom on a hawthorn hedge.