David Hockney's Less Trees Near Warter (2009) is a deliberate, melancholic sequel — its title a pointed inversion of Bigger Trees Near Warter, the 2007 celebration of a Yorkshire sycamore copse. Numbered 11 of 15, this inkjet-printed computer drawing revisits the same stretch of countryside after the trees have been felled, extending Hockney's decade-long return to the East Yorkshire landscape of his childhood. 

A vast, churning sky of gray and lavender cloud bears down on a scene of quiet devastation. Two pale dirt roads, scored with tire tracks, converge into a wedge of raw red earth strewn with cut logs and a small smoldering fire — a red gash against the emerald fields and hedgerows on either side. A blue-roofed cottage anchors one edge, a solitary utility pole stands erect, all the more prominent in the absence of the trees that once kept sentinel alongside it, and a weathered signpost points toward Warter and Huggate.  

The work belongs to an unbroken run of Yorkshire landscapes Hockney made through the 2000s — from the thirty-six watercolors of Midsummer: East Yorkshire (2004), through Bigger Trees Near Warter, later gifted to Tate in a fifty-panel version, to the iPad drawings of 2010–11. Completed ahead of Hockney's 2012 Royal Academy survey “A Bigger Picture,” it stands as a spare, elegiac counterpoint to the lushness that made this same Yorkshire road famous.