David Hockney on joy, longing and spring light: 'I'm teaching the French how to paint Normandy!'

'I think it looks terrific," says David Hockney. The 83-year-old artist is taking a look around his new exhibition at the Royal Academy in London for the first time. He seems happy with it – and rightly so, for it is hypnotic and ravishing. But while I am getting a sneak preview in person, Hockney is here only virtually, his face appearing on two screens, one a giant TV, the other a small laptop. He is at home, at what he calls his "seven dwarves house" in Normandy, wearing a red, black and white check jacket, a checkerboard tie, a blue-green pullover and round, gold-framed glasses. His kaleidoscopic choice of clothing, challenging the very limits of the video call's bandwidth, is as vibrant and beguiling as the canvases hanging around us. Hockney has not just painted spring; he has come dressed as it. The artist has agreed to talk me through the exhibition, called The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020, and the arrangement underlines his idiosyncratic ease with technology. To make these iPad paintings, he and his team created a version of the Brushes app, working with a computer expert in Leeds to speed things up. "Drawing requires a certain speed," he says. "In Rembrandt's drawings, you can see how fast he drew." I can't handle Hockney on the big screen, so I sit in front of the laptop – after first taking in his art. He has filled some of the grandest rooms in the RA with pictures of blossoming branches, spilling flower beds, a rain-spattered pond and a tree house: simple subjects, faithfully depicted. I first saw many of these last spring, in my email inbox. Day after day, sometimes more than once a day, I would find a new Hockney, fresh from France, which was a great pick-me-up as the full scope of the pandemic began to dawn. The trouble was that I was soon running out of superlatives in my replies. He was "doing the arrival of spring in Normandy", as he puts it, and the work made headlines around the world when he released a few images to the media. Clearly, it was not just me who found Hockney's passionate pictures of new life in his cottage and garden in the Norman paysage uplifting. Here was movingly optimistic art, full of the promise of spring, even as Covid plunged the planet into despair. Now those pictures have been printed up to the scale of oil landscapes and are looking even better. This is Hockney's best exhibition in a long time, perhaps his most important ever, given the ode to joy it offers an injured world. It is also "a homage", he says, to the painters who first inspired him. Hockney was born in industrial Bradford in 1937 and grew up in a smoggy postwar Britain. Where did he get a feeling for all the bright strong colours that sweep this exhibition? "Well, it came from Monet and Matisse and Picasso.