At the bottom of this page are views of the East Yorkshire village of Sledmere and of the Wolds countryside as you have never seen them before.

The two extraordinary and almost hallucinatory paintings, painted in blazing reds and vivid greens, are far from the traditional English landscape.

They are the work of Britain's most popular living artist David Hockney, and they can be seen until Easter Monday at Salts Mill art gallery in Saltaire, Shipley, along with several other Hockney paintings of East and North Yorkshire.

Hockney painted them during the glorious summer of 1997 when he was staying with his elderly mother at Bridlington and travelling regularly across the Wolds to visit his dying friend, businessman Jonathan Silver, of Wetherby.

He painted them for Jonathan, who opened the gallery in 1987, and is said to have worked against the clock so he could finish them before his friend died of cancer last September.

Hockney, who was born in Yorkshire but lives in California, is reported to have fallen in love with the East Yorkshire landscape. He felt the countryside was very unspoilt and the colours fantastic.

Robin Silver, of Salts Mill, said Hockney had an understanding and affinity with the landscape, having worked in the fields near Pocklington as a child. "It's familiar territory."

He said the artist painted the scenes in the studio but had taken many photos and drawn sketches out in the East Yorkshire countryside last summer.

The Yorkshire paintings will be going on display in Boston, America, later this spring, and some may appear at a major Hockney retrospective exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris next year.

The Salts Mill gallery is open each day from 10 until 6pm, admission free. For further information, contact 01274 531163.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.