Can great art really be created on an iPad? Next week Britain's greatest living artist will unveil stunning images of nature drawn with an app. But some critics miss the drama of paint.

Clad in a flat cap, teal cardigan and striped red tie, the artist David Hockney surveys these springtime scenes. Like generations of painters before him, he turns the landscape around him into striking, alluring pictures.

Unlike them, he has no paint, no brushes, no easel. Instead, his fingers glide across the smooth, flat screen of an iPad. Nearby, in his timber-framed Seven Dwarves house, a pile of spares sit charging.

Next week, Hockney's digitally-created images will be revealed to the public at London's Royal Academy.

The critics have already weighed in. Jackie Wullschlager in the Financial Times praised Hockney's "rapid virtuosity", while Jonathan Jones of The Guardian hailed it as "Hockney's best exhibition in a long time, perhaps his most important ever".

Yet for some traditionalists, Hockney's new work is a travesty of painting. According to German artist Otto Dix, "painting is an effort to produce order". A chaos of strange, smelly substances are transformed, through sweat, patience and genius, into something beautiful.

Painting is physically and mentally demanding. Rembrandt took three years to complete The Night Watch. Claude Monet spent three decades perfecting his Water Lilies. Hockney's new works, though, were produced with the quick flick of a wrist over a screen. There is no sense of risk: each stroke can be edited and erased.

Even when printed out for display, digitally-created works lack physicality. When we look at a Rembrandt self-portrait, we see every agonised brushstroke made by his ageing hand. By contrast, Hockney's is an art without human traces.

For others, these views are fussy and outdated. Art has always evolved with materials and technology. "Purists will quibble," opines Daily Mail critic Robert Hardman of Hockney's new work, "that this is not real 'painting' but... Leonardo might have said the same about acrylic."

Art attack

In his book Secret Knowledge, Hockney himself linked the redevelopment of Western art to devices such as the camera obscura and camera lucida. The iPad might be just another link in this long chain.

Our conception of what art can be has expanded hugely in the past century. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp signed a porcelain urinal and placed it in an exhibition. Art has widened ever since.

Andy Warhol, for instance, sold Brillo boxes. Ana Mendieta filmed herself lying in streams and puddles. And Anne Imhof won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale with a five-hour live performance featuring dancers and dogs.

Great art is about ambition and ethos as much as technique. According to Pablo Picasso, "painting is just another way of keeping a diary". By casually depicting the passing of time as he experiences it, Hockney follows in Picasso's celebrated footsteps.

Can great art really be created on an iPad?

Without a doubt, claim some. Head to the Royal Academy, and stand in front of Hockney's digitally-rendered trees, hedges and water lilies. Admire their vibrant colours and clear strokes. Feel the life pulsing through them. Sense the presence of an old man who has found such happiness in nature, even during a pandemic. If this is not great art, then what is?

Absolutely not, insist others. Go to Paris, and look closely at Monet's Water Lilies. Absorb the delicate layers of paint, the extraordinary dapples of colour, the way the French artist captures the most minute shifts in light and shade. While Hockney's work is slick, joyful and easy to enjoy, Monet's expresses the true complexity and subtly of real life. That is what great art is all about.