Last year in ROYGBIV I took issue with the new digital art dealers ‘[sedition]’ selling ludicrously expensive videos of works by artists like Hirst and Emin for the iPad. With the optimism of the new year, I’ve decided to consider art on the iPad in a more positive light.

David Hockney, who has embraced the iPad as a new artistic medium, gained my respect in his choice to utilise this new technology with a comment accompanying his new exhibition at the Royal Academy in London: “All the works here were made by the artist himself, personally.” He admitted that Hirst specifically came to mind when he made this comment, an artist who frequently baffles the everyday art dabbler with his lack of input into actual production of his fortune-generating artworks.

Rather charmingly, talking about his use of his iPhone to create art, Hockney told The Telegraph that he draws flowers every day and sends them to his friends “so they get fresh flowers every morning. And my flowers last.”

The technology of the iPad allows more room to draw, being about the same size as a sketch-pad. More excitingly, the strokes of the finger are recorded while the artist draws. This means we can watch Hockney’s process, and so can he, from beginning to end. The Royal Academy are including these art videos as part of the exhibition of Hockney’s recent work depicting the East Yorkshire landscape.

The images he creates on the iPad have a distinctive aesthetic: each hazy image has an uncertain luminosity, expressive but definitely nothing like an image created without modern technology. Initially they do look a little like something drawn on Paint, but once you look closely it is evident the iPad is a medium to be explored and developed in the future. Hockney captures light beautifully, hypnotically, as it reacts with many different aspects of nature.

Art in this context will be close to identical to the original if you were to purchase the equivalent of a print, because it’s digital. And opening things up to technology can only mean further innovation in pattern and texture.

While digital art dealers such as s[edition] are exploiting the iPad as technology that further commercialises the art world, artists (and Hockney is not the only one by any means) are now using the same technology to open exciting new doors for a new year.