Knowing Your App From Your Elbow

Besides the sweet shop shrubbery and tree trunks the colour of liquorice allsorts, the other abiding image of Hockney this year has been of the maestro himself, sitting and sketching, with a fag in one hand and an iPad in the other. It's enlightening to see an acknowledged great working in a medium that hitherto has been the province of children, geeks and fantasy artists. One imagines it's a bit like watching that other David - Beckham - playing Subbuteo; only less likely.  But there it is, hundreds of Hockney's iPad images have been appearing in respectable art galleries as well as online, so like it or not, thanks to Hockney, iPad art has achieved legitimacy with astonishing rapidity.

But what about the feel and the smell of oil paint? purists may say. How can these images be unique? Where's the skill?

Anyone who's tried to navigate the slick surface of an iPad screen, leaving a vapour trail of coloured pixels beneath their index finger, will know that the business requires a fine degree of manual dexterity and hand/eye co-ordination. The thing doesn't draw for you and if you're no good with pencil and paper, you'll be even worse with an iPad. Of course, it's a mass-produced item, but so too, is a tube of oil paint; at least since Winsor and Newton started making them in the 1830's. The nostalgists among us may lament the iPad's lack of tactility and its odourlessness but neither of these things are, in my view, prerequisites for great art. It has to look right way before I care whether or not it smells right. And as for the work's presence, its hand-made, artisan-crafted look, this has been a debate in art long before Damien Hirst started paying people to paint his dot pictures; before Warhol, too, in fact, when Pieter Breughel the Younger set up a factory to reproduce his dad's masterpieces back in the sixteenth century.

Although the iPad signals a huge change in the way we make art, it is not about to replace other paint media - yet. It is, however, an extremely valuable tool for the artist to add to his or her kitbag. Most usefully, it is paintbrush, pencil and paper combined. Most powerfully, it is both shop window and gallery, too.

So let's not spend too long worrying about whether or not the iPad signals the end of art any more than Vincent Van Gogh fretted about having his canvases shipped ready-made from Paris. Let us concentrate, instead, on the challenges that new technology offers the artist. By far the biggest for any iPad artist, has to be to give their work character, to transform that immutable little rectangle into a magic window that makes us look, with a fresh mind upon our world.

So what's new?

All images © David Chandler created on ArtRage for iPad.

David Chandler will be teaching art for iPad at Studio Paradiso (23 May - 2 June and 21 September - 5 October 2012), Chateau L'Age Baston (23 June - 21 July 2012), Exeter Phoenix (19 February 2013) and Dillington House (2 , 23 March & 4 July 2013).