The 79-year-old British artist, whose works are among the world's most recognisable pieces of contemporary art, first tried using computers three decades ago but found their limitations deeply frustrating.

"I first used a computer in 1986," he said at a preview of his National Gallery of Victoria exhibition in Melbourne on Thursday. "Drawing on it was OK but when you'd finish ... the drawing itself [appeared] two minutes later. Just the lines were there. I thought, well, it's not really a very good medium for a draftsman."

He resisted the lure of mobile phones (like Degas with the introduction of the telephone more than a century earlier, he was worried he would become a servant to the device). Yet he succumbed in 2009 after the arrival of the iPhone, which opened up a new world of creative possibilities through the Brush application, and more still with the iPad in 2010.

"I started drawing and I quickly realised this was a marvellous new medium ... You could actually work in the dark, you could do a lot of things.

"If you draw on an iPad, you can play it back, every mark is recorded."

While Hockney's hearing presents some limitations, he's still extremely prolific and shows no signs of slowing. "I'm just going to go on working 'til I fall over," he says. "I don't go out much. I'm too deaf to go out of an evening ... I just work. I'm perfectly happy."

The 1200 works on display from the past 10 years of Hockney's output, including many displayed on iPhones and others on large banks of screens, remove the veil from his creative process, recording every brushstroke in vivid colour and detail.

They include works made within the past few months and major pieces that take up entire rooms, including 4 blue stools, 2014, a wallpaper of stitched-together digital images, his Yosemite landscape series and The Four Seasons, Woldgate Woods, a video work shot with nine cameras in a Yorkshire country lane.

The exhibition also features a series of portraits, painted by Hockney, of the likes of Australian performer Barry Humphries, US architect Frank Gehry and American artist John Baldessari in the series 86 Portraits and A Still Life.

His brother John Hockney, who moved to Australia more than 50 years ago and now lives in the Blue Mountains, has watched his sibling make art for many decades.

"It's incredible, he becomes a totally different person with a brush in his hand," he says. "He screws his eyes up ... he doesn't rest, his eyes are on the portraits he's actually doing. He's totally focused, nothing else matters."

John, whose portrait features in the NGV show, says he thinks this exhibition is the greatest showcase he has seen of his brother's work.

"I've seen his shows in San Francisco and elsewhere, but this is far, far the best ever," he says.

David Hockney: Current is at NGV International from November 11 until March 13.