I had forgotten about The Rake's Progress etchings on the walls of the Senior Common Room at the Royal College of Art during Sir Robin Darwin's time. Was that about 1969 or 1970?

The media of art and design technologies evolve faster than Darwinian evolution and certainly faster than Sir Robin did. I seem to recall he was a smoker too, like Hockney.

(An aside, it's spooky how many times nowadays you can see the word mediums used in place of media in the illiterat'-arty circles, in Brick Lane for instance.)

Raking through the archives with the aid of the internet I am reminded of the era. Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy. The preparatory photographs show how the camera has rendered the artist as extinct as the dinosaurs, or nearly. Time Team should have traced the footprints of the photographers' tripods in the silts at Traitor's Gate at The Tower of London. In The National Gallery is the fabulous painting of Jane Grey by Paul Delaroche. Delaroche's comment on hearing of Louis Daguerre and Nicéphore Niepce in the 1820s and 1830s inventing photography, daguerreotypes, was to come home to me in the exhibition entitled "From today painting is dead", at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 16 March-14 May 1972. Picasso died in 1973, so there you have it. Is Hockney an endangered species of Californian Redwood Sasquatch preserved, smoking, half-kippered even, on a Yorkshire rare breeds farm?

The rake drags on reducing rough furrows to fine dust. Pixellated. The lines of the harrow repeat across landscapes, roadways, floors, walls, everything. Monotony is the new black. Like an archaeologist in Time Team, scraping away the sticking mud, stripping down through the layers. The first test pit is too deep. The bare bones of a marriage. Duchamp's "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even," Is art a reflection on life? Another test pit, another generation, the bare bones of a marriage. I wasn't of that generation, I didn't meet Ossie Clark that I can recall, though I worked with someone who did. I just once bought a pair of his brightly coloured trousers. A bit tight in the crotch for cycling. At the hypothetical Hockney dig Time Team have found something in the bottom of the sieve, a stiletto, an Italian dagger. From Time Team to Crime Scene. The link is tenuous, but if the reverberations of the Big Bang can still be heard, there could be reverberations traceable through a short sentence in the transcript. Archaeology and Sixties Art History are mixing like undigested compost, odd bedfellows, like the finely raked household waste at Edmonton digested as manure, or burnt for electrical power generation.

The librarian has turned up a couple of books but they are from another layer. An 'as new' volume from the Petersburg Press from 1982 of Hockney's photographs. We had all been joining photographs together for decades, winding still film through the camera in time exposures, multiple exposures. But the Polaroid montage of David Graves is interesting for the iconic vase of fresh, erect tulips. A cacophony of Freuds chorus on that slip of colours.

In 1997 Hong Kong reverted to China. I had lived there in the 1970s and slipped through the bamboo curtain to Canton, just after Mao died.

Hockney would have enjoyed Canton in 1978, at every commune meeting there was a saucerful of loose fags on the table. Smoke filled rooms. Green tea in red flasks. At the Friendship Stores everything that China could produce, especially gaudily overdecorated china, but little that you need. Carved elephant ivory, now proscribed. Coral, now proscribed. Animal products, animal parts, ground penis concoctions, proscribed, proscribed, proscribed. Friendships proscribed. Buddhism pretty much devastated. Ask the Dalai Lama.

New teapots from Yixing, old Yixing teapots shipped by train to Hong Kong. Chinese scroll paintings. Formulaic but easy to live with.

Yet I see here the marks and motifs that come to Hockney's hand. The Kweilin mountainscapes, the palm trees, less patient than the young Tang A-hsi, less observed. Less and less. But not in the Bauhaus spirit. Not even in the style of De Stijl. Laissez-faire, rampant, like lung cancer from passive smoking.

Now a decade after the Tien An Men democracy demonstrations and just before the handover of Hong Kong I visited Beijing. The art market was now big business. Yet the artist was considered a youngster in his trade even though he was in is eighties. What would they have made of this whippersnapper Hockney? Another decade and he will learn how to paint tulips perhaps? Even the child Tang A-hsi knew how to hold his brush erect and make his marks properly.

And here we are, nearly catching up in the wake of The Rake as he progresses. It's about his marks. The signature style of the artist. Another aside. At the reopening of the Whitechapel Art Gallery there was a photograph on the entrance wall by Juergen Teller, an overblown colour print of David Hockney slouching under a trail of fag ash marking his crumpled suit - that says it all, he will be cremated along with his pack of fags. It's not there any more, the photo has already been replaced.

What is there to see in the present edition of Photoshop prints? It's like the old days of Cybernetic Serendipity at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The world of computers pretty much untamed. Garbage in, garbage out. Slow small memory capacity of the machine replaced by slow small memory capacity of the artist. Gigagbytes to hand but marks inhibited by the software and the hand. In the old photographic joiners and the Polaroids the enjoyment was in having the eye travel across and making a greater picture in the mind's eye. Photoshop was originally developed for blending facial features in making Photo-Fits of criminals. Wanted. Now the criminals are using Photoshop to render their artworks. It is a suite of software which in skilled hands can achieve so much. Oh that John Heartfield could be alive now. Or Kuniyoshi. But what has Hockney made of all the power of the software?

Tall black trees - Inkjet printed computer drawing and photo collage on paper. Edition of 7

Too big for the back of the outhouse toilet door, so where could you hang this? The lazy hand movements have a staggeringly limited vocabulary of marks and Photoshop brushes. This is a bit of a botch job, you can see the joins. Even a basic Media Studies workshop would provide the skills to make seamless transitions between elements. Yet I don't suppose the artist is trying to achieve the professionalism of a digital designer, just scribbling away with a fag to hand. Where are my glasses? Don't worry, it looks better without them. Half empty, half fool! Yorkshire bitter? I don't mind if I do.

The pointillists made the effort. Van Gogh made iconic marks. Hockney seems to make a bit of a pig's ear of it.

Summer road near Kilham - The same technical resources yet the trees are reminiscent of plastic bonsai produced in the factories in Hong Kong, still available in bad garden centres. More sloppy tone and colour gradation, destroying natural beauty. Pass me an ashtray. A bigger one.

Summer sky - Another crude and lazy composition with improbable trees framing an equally ludicrous sky each quite ill matched to the road. There is just one small fragment of detail smudged in characteristic Photoshop effect which opens the mind to an imaginary journey.

Winter road near Kilham - More tedious tree silhouettes blend into a watercolour landscape with blobby little stick trees. Bubble-gum trees as common as bubble-gum on our pavements.

Green valley - Lazy sweeping composition, formulaic landscape.

Autumn trees near Thixendale - The motif and mark making has become an obsessive compulsive disorder.

Autumn leaves - Fauve?

Rainy night in Bridlington promenade - Lights like tulips like phalluses like trees like? Dislike. Like Man, a little splash.

The twenty-five big trees between Bridlington School on Bessingby Road, in the semi-Egyptian style. Repeated hedge clumps, repeated church tower, repeated pavilion, spot the difference quiz? There is more layering skill in this piece but the foreground is botched in customary Hockney style. Perceptive pensioners pointed pertinently past paving perimeter fences, patched, painted Photoshop.

Kilham with church - Pastel

Cardigan Road - Near Day-glo roof tiles.

The fourth floor gallery was bright and hot under the sunlight. I first looked at the work without the catalogue. It's a refreshing experience to see work as it is, for what it is, that hasn't been written about, over curated. It makes you look at the work first and foremost. Marks before remarks. Annely Juda Fine Art certainly got that right.

The portraits on the third floor are drawn to a formula on a production line, same chair, same table, same pose usually, same floor, same wall, same, same, same. The difference is sometimes in the names, sometimes the same names. Just two fags. One unlit, the other smoking. Not unlike a smoking gun.

Certain details recur. Attention to the eyes, then the rest of the face and the hair. Beyond that the lumps that sit frequently legs splayed, hands together where they naturally come together. Not much attention to observed anatomy. Sitting on a chair, occasionally with a table, the same table. Just a rare few props such as a potted plant, a bottle and a glass.

The decades have passed and he can render a vase of flowers, the Chinese were right?

Constable did it better, landscapes and portraits.

When it comes to spectacles these are treated minimally, once with a flash of gold across the bridge of the nose and a blue reflection on the glass. Mostly the compositions are tied together with a vivid red line. Has all that tobacco smoke affected his eyes, does he need a cataract operation?

I called them portraits but perhaps they should be full figure drawings. Yet none of these words fit comfortably. I viewed then first without the catalogue, no names no pack drill.

Jamie McHale 1 - I saw the work at least twice and can't remember anything, at least I won't tell!

Dominic Elliott - Red curly hair, red shade on arms, red frenzy on clasped hands.

Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima - Scribbled face, bold green and pink background, black suit and bow tie, legs of a frog kick, hands clasped.

Jonathon Wilkinson - Nothing remembered, nought noted.

Margaret Hockney - Glasses. A sketchy shadow on the ground.

Dr. Elizabeth Barton - A better pose but the perspective of the rectangular table top doesn't quite match the three legs. It's not Chinese perspective, it's not Cubist, it's not much but laziness and indecisiveness. Or the pretension, the decision, to be indecisive. The flower in the pot on the table and the pot itself are better observed even though minimal.

Maurice Payne - Nice grey haircut, usual rubbish composition.

Jaime McHale 2 - Eyes.

Peter Goulds - Spectacles, glass and bottle on table.

Paul Hockney 1 - White background, that's better. Red line on hands which are using a mobile phone or a calculator. At last the process looks more 'painterly', the chair is pleasantly sketchy. He used to be able to draw, there is a ghostly skill still evidenced here at work.

Michel and John Spike - Same table and chairs, odd pastel landscape painting behind them on the wall. Horrible floor.

Paul Hockney 2 - Blue reflection on spectacles, gold across nose. Rough treatment of the floor.

Paul and Margaret Hockney - A very rough sketch completely ill-proportioned for the vertical frame format. Composition, what composition?

Francis Russell - Eyes in detail, graduated to sketchy chair, white background.

Matelot Kevin Druez 1 - Cigarette in hand, unlit. Chair legs well worked, ferocious sketchy background.

Matelot Kevin Druez 2 - Chair turned round, now smoking, the smoke detail is quite amusing.

Sir Tatton Sykes - The fine line detail on the face is similar to copperplate engraving but without the incisive start and finish from the tool. The pressure sensitivity of the graphics tablet, or the artist, or both just can't do in pixels what steel on copper can do with molecules. The rest of the surface is like felt tip scribbles.

The Atelier March 17th 2009 - The top third is the treescape "The twenty-five big trees . . ." (with the sixteen word title) The middle third is ten of the portraits. Then to the left is a cuboid faced with the Matelot, twice featured in the same composition, and the top of the form has a stubby dead tree. The foreground has a blank stage with a chair and a patch of grass or Californian Astro-turf. To the right one of the very detailed black trees à la Photoshop. And down, off stage in the right corner Sir Tatton Sykes sits. The title of the composition is scribbled with the tablet across the bottom of the print. They probably teach Typography in Photoshop in the second chapter of the 'Photoshop for Dummies' handbook. Read on.

So back into the real world, outside the zeros and ones of the digital art experience. The nearest pub is the Duke of York. Remember the song? I had marched up four flights of stairs to the exhibition and marched right down again. (By the way, my favourite pub is the Cittie of Yorke near Chancery Lane.) But then I came upon Noritada Kimura's pleasant teapots and cups at the Postcard Teas shop right next door to the Duke of York. It wasn't all a waste of time after all.

Then I drifted down Bond Street and saw Peter Blake's fine print of Babe Rainbow at the Alan Cristea Gallery, and Lichtenstein's woodblock print Nude in the Woods. Hockney's print was Picture of a Still Life that has an Elaborate Silver Frame, 1. That pretty much says it all. More words in the title as usual than content in the work. Back in the Sixties I bought my sister an offset lithoprint on metal of Babe Rainbow in Carnaby Street. She still has it on the inside of the outdoor toilet door. That was a good investment!

I ended up having a look at the sculpture of Joshua Reynolds in the courtyard at the Royal Academy of Arts. Last time I had been there for the Kuniyoshi exhibition they had been erecting a huge marquee over his head but his brushes didn't quite reach the canvas. Now he was waving grandly in limitless blue skies. My iMac screen also has a field of limitless azure. At the bottom of the screen even below the Photoshop icon there is a cute little icon in neat perspective. I love it. Run the mouse over it and it says Trash. You can clear everything cluttering your computer; Garbage in, Garbage out. Click Trash twice, click Empty. All those virtual Hockney zeros and ones wiped off the memory. Do it.

Now, back to the drawing board. I'm bored with his drawing. What do you think Tang A-hsi?

 © Brian Marsh, London  11 May 2009. initiative.cafe@btinternet.com