‘We think winter is drab, but you’re just not looking for the colours. They are there,” says David Hockney. And so, in the Royal Academy’s latest show, David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, the 74-year-old artist gives us purple roads, pink fields, turquoise hills, sapphire trees, orange logs, fairytale blooms, and acres of hyper-real Yorkshire landscape coloured by active imagination.

It’s as if the thrill of nature rediscovered since coming back to the landscape of his childhood — Hockney returned in 2005 to live in Bridlington, East Yorkshire, after four decades living in California — has unleashed the bold, brash, vivid palette used for those 1960s paintings of sparkling swimming pools and socialite Los Angeles lifestyles that made his name for him.

The show has a most theatrical start. The Central Hall, the first of 13 galleries showing 150 works mostly made since 2005, encircles viewers with four enormous oil paintings (each of eight canvases) of trees observed near the village of Thixendale in the Yorkshire Wolds. Painted from the same spot, season by season, 2007 to 2008, these three trees between fields change in colour, content, light and mood. From a bitter winter of unexpected hues, oranges, greens, reds and blues, to delicate spring, to decidedly lush summer, and exuberant autumn, the series is a celebration of transitions in nature and of dedicated observation.

The theatricality increases with three of Hockney’s beloved ‘long views’ seen from the opening gallery. They beckon the viewer to see: to the right, the blisteringly red hot Grand Canyon and other early landscapes (the room works as a mini-retrospective, including two grey 1950s Yorkshire paintings, and photo-collages); straight ahead, the stripy orange shadows of Woldgate Woods; and off to the left, filling the entire end wall of the Academy’s largest space, a fantastical work of floating leaves and soaring trunks: The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty-eleven). It’s like walking into wonderland. The Woldgate Woods series of seven paintings (six canvases each) is all diagonals, verticals and outlandish hues. Painted at speed from the same viewpoint (a recurring theme, capturing light’s transience and gaining perspective on a scene, like Monet), they make an eloquent comment on the passage of time. Best of all are the timber trees. Here, Hockney’s vision positively explodes from the walls. The colours of Winter Timber, 2009 are flat, vivid, Fauvist, but this ordinary corner of an extraordinary wood offers a touch of mystery as orange logs, newly felled, line up, leading the eye to a vortex of treetops at the edge of the woods, and a strange sculptural purple trunk looks on.

Always ready to embrace new technologies, Hockney now uses the iPhone and iPad as art making tools. Fifty-one iPad drawings, printed and shown consecutively record the steady approach of spring, and a series of films produced using 18 cameras shown on multiple screens towards the end of the show is quietly spellbinding. Not all is wonderful; his hawthorn blossom paintings were too odd, too clunky for my liking, and many works are unremarkable, taken individually. But taken as a whole, they are scintillating. An expansive cheery joyride of a show through impossibly bright countryside it’s just the thing for drab midwinter.

Until April 9. 0844 209 0051 (www.royalacademy.org.uk).