Age is supposed to make people slower and more set in their ways: somebody should tell David Hockney.

Seventy-three yesterday, the Bradford-born artist is long past the age when people stop working, start taking multi-vitamins and worry whether their pension will cover the next increase in council tax.

Although he professes to no orthodox religious belief, he is the embodiment of the Protestant work ethic, more accurately the Non-Conformist work ethic, passed on by his parents, Kenneth and Laura.

One of a family of seven raised largely in Eccleshill, the young Hockney drew and painted from an early age. More than six decades later, he’s still at it. The making of images remains both an obsession and a fascination. Last year, he was voted the country’s favourite painter.

Hockney’s passion for art is undiminished, but he no longer wheels painting materials about in pram as he did in his youth in Bradford. Art has made him wealthy; he uses his considerable economic power to employ the latest technology in his explorations.

He says: “People who control images have social control. For about 400 years, the main supplier of images was the church. That declined with the 19th century and the spread of photography.

“By the 20th century, social control had moved to the media. They exerted social control for 60 to 80 years. That’s now breaking up. It’s breaking up because the iPad will finish it off.

“I can produce images and distribute them myself to London, Los Angeles, Saltaire. So there’s a big transformation going on. I follow the technology carefully, especially about images, and I keep up with it. I keep up with anything to do with the production and distribution of images.”

In May, Hockney told one London evening newspaper that Apple’s new iPad would sell by the million. He said: “It will change the way we look at everything, from reading newspapers to the drawing pad. It can be anything you want it to be.” Artists would be encouraged to use their hands again, to paint and draw with.

Not for the first time, events have shown him to be right. Since its launch in Britain, sales of the iPad are reportedly running at around about a million a month.

When I first interviewed Hockney for the T&A in 1985, he was pushing forward the frontier of photography with his recently-invented joiner photographs.

Recently, he has been using his iPhone to draw pictures and send them to friends. Last month, he was singing the praises of his Californian iPad in a national newspaper.

However, there is usually a price to be paid for technological developments. Hockney wonders whether the liberation from mass media social control will result in the further fragmentation of the nation.

Alan Bennett used to say that when he was a boy, BBC radio – ‘wireless’ in those days – held the nation together. Has the prevalence of individual blogging, tweeting and iPadding, the numerous radio stations and television channels to choose from 24/7, helped or hindered that bonding process?

“As mass media collapses, where will shared experiences come from? Do you get famous on YouTube? You do, but not for long.

“We are moving out of the mass media period and I am not sure what it will be like. I am wondering what the shared experience will be,” he says.

The World Cup is an obvious counter to that argument. But who can say whether the competition will remain on terrestrial television, especially after the last Ashes cricket series?

As the spirit of this age of surveillance and economic attrition gets narrower and meaner, Hockney responds by painting ever-larger, more ambitious and exciting pictures, employing as many as nine small digital cameras to record details of the panorama.

He first started painting the Yorkshire landscape back in 1997, at the request of Salts Mill owner Jonathan Silver, who was dying of pancreatic cancer.

Oil paintings such as The Road To York Through Sledmere were followed by a sequence of water colours of East Yorkshire scenes.

For the last six years or so, he has been working on huge East Yorkshire oilscapes, culminating in the 50-piece Bigger Trees Near Warter, painted in sections and assembled with the assistance of computers at his Bridlington home.

An artist slaving away in a basement or garret would not have the means to work on this scale, let alone keep up homes and studios in LA, London and Bridlington and employ assistants in all those places. A lot of people depend on Hockney for their livelihood.

But he seems to bear these responsibilities lightly, keeping his mind concentrated on art, sending out pictures drawn on his iPad to friends and assembling his Yorkshire landscapes.

Those paintings are to form one of the biggest exhibitions of his career for the Royal Academy of Art in 2012.

David Graves, Hockney’s London assistant, told me that virtually the whole of the ground floor of the Royal Academy, up to 12 rooms, were likely to be devoted to the show – presumably to mark Hockney’s 75th birthday.