Salts Mill: Hockney's iPad paintings, drawing themselves
The app's work on the walls of his home gallery – and the website behind it
Where: Salts Mill, Saltaire, Bradford
What: 20 Flowers for 2025 and Some Bigger Pictures, Gallery 3, to 17 January 2027. Free.
Our part: The painting app and replay tooling behind the six-screen installation; the Salts Mill website
In a sentence
Twenty iPad flower paintings made in the app we built for David Hockney, and a six-screen installation of one of them drawing itself, stroke by stroke – free to walk in and watch, in the mill that has shown his work since 1987.
Above: Gallery 3, 20 Flowers for 2025. Photo: Jonathan Wilkinson / Salts Mill.
The mill
Salts Mill has been Hockney's gallery in the north since Jonathan Silver opened the 1853 Gallery there in 1987, and the Silver family have kept it that way since: a UNESCO-listed mill in Saltaire, a bookshop, a diner, and more Hockney on the walls than anywhere outside London. It's twenty minutes from our studio, and the place we send people who ask where they can see the iPad paintings for themselves.
Salts Mill, Saltaire. Photo: Jonathan Wilkinson / Salts Mill.
The exhibition
20 Flowers for 2025 and Some Bigger Pictures is the first showing in the UK outside London of the twenty iPad flower paintings – begun in February 2021 at a table in his house in Normandy, with the low winter sun throwing shadows from a vase of flowers – alongside the larger landscape and abstract works he made with them. "New looking fresh pictures of a very beautiful world," in his words.
And on one wall of the gallery, six screens play 10th–22nd June 2021, Water Lilies in the Pond with Pots of Flowers as it was made – on view for the first time in Europe: every stroke, in the order he made them, at the speed he made them.
The six-screen replay, three minutes of painting compressed into twenty seconds. Filmed in the gallery, September 2026.
Gallery 3: the flowers, the bigger pictures, and the screens.
What's ours in the room
The flowers were painted in Hockney Brushes, the app we built for him in 2018 and have looked after since. The replays exist because the app records every stroke as it's made; the tools we maintain turn that record back into a film of the painting appearing, at whatever size a wall needs. The studio exported these ones with those tools, and Salts Mill put them on six screens.
The finished painting on the six screens, between cycles.
The website, too
We look after saltsmill.org.uk with Jonathan Wilkinson. It's due a rebuild, and that's under way; when it's done, what's on the walls will be the first thing you see.
A note of thanks
When the exhibition opened in January 2025, Zoe Silver took the trouble to mention us in the BBC News report – for our part in the app – which is typical of the place, and much appreciated.
Gallery 3, Salts Mill. Photos and video: Reflex Arc, September 2026, with the permission of Salts Mill.
David Hockney artworks shown for documentation of Reflex Arc's project history only, © David Hockney / the David Hockney Foundation. No licensing available via Reflex Arc.
