London - Leading British contemporary artist David Hockney has said he is furious with tree-fellers who chopped down an ancient forest he had planned to paint in all four seasons.

Hockney, 71, had completed the winter and summer paintings of trees near his home in Yorkshire, northern England, but was shocked to find just sawn trunks and discarded branches when he arrived to do his study of spring, the Guardian reported Friday.

He described was a saw as a "massacre ... like a scene from the first world war," said the Guardian.

The 900-year-old copse of mighty sycamores and beeches had been the subject of a giant oil painting exhibited at the Royal Academy in London two years ago, which Hockney donated to Tate Gallery.

Hockney, best known in the 1960s and 70s for his paintings of brightly-coloured swimming pools under a blue Californian sky, has recently returned to landscape painting on a grand scale.

The two paintings completed in the present series - Summer and Winter - will go on exhibition next month at the Wuerth Museum in Kuenzelsau, southern Germany.

"I admit they had a perfect right to do this - but it seems sad," Hockney said about the lost trees.

However, after returning to the spot once more, he had decided that the transformed scene could make a painting, said Hockney.

"The piles of wood are quite beautiful in their own right, simply because wood can't help being beautiful." (dpa)