ALASTAIR S OOKE
My Parents (1977) by David Hockney
If any artist can boost the nation’s mood, it’s David Hockney: goodness knows, we could all do with some of his poolside Californian sunshine. Earlier this year, as we cowered during lockdown, the Yorkshireman released a picture of daffodils entitled Do Remember They Can’t Cancel the Spring. Hope, with libertarian defiance.
For this series, though, I’ve picked My Parents (1977), in the Tate, for the simple reason that most of us are missing family. It’s a simple image, too. Against a quivering expanse of duckegg blue, the artist’s elderly parents sit on either side of a green trolley supporting a dressing-room mirror and a vase of yellow and pink tulips.
Did I say “simple”? Things are subtler than that. In the glass, we spy reflections of a postcard of Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ, in the National Gallery, and the corner of another painting by Hockney featuring a green curtain. The erudite atmosphere is underscored by a volume devoted to the French painter Chardin, alongside Proust, on the trolley’s lower shelf, and by the fact that Hockney’s father, Kenneth, a clerk and antismoking campaigner, is engrossed in Aaron Scharf ’s Art and Photography –a subject close to the artist’s heart.
Dressed in a suit, Kenneth hunches in concentration, lifting his heels to bring closer the book propped on one knee. His obliviousness, suggesting his interior world, is a brilliant touch – but it came about by accident as much as design.
In an earlier, abandoned version, started while Hockney was living in Paris, his dad – a notorious fidget – sits stiffly, bookless, staring to the left. His final pose was therefore both a solution to a pictorial problem and a reflection of character. He
died the following year.
Intriguingly, that preliminary version also contains Hockney’s selfportrait in the mirror. In Tate’s canvas, this has gone. Thus, the only person to engage directly with the viewer is Hockney’s Methodist, vegetarian mother, Laura, dressed in Marian blue – appropriately, given the cocky substitution, in the mirror, of Piero’s Christ for the artist’s likeness.
Laura appears timeless, sphinxlike – but she also radiates warmth: note her fond, kindly smile, and that hint of motion in her feet. Indeed, the faint foxtrot of both parents’ shoes on the speckled lilac rug – the trolley’s castors imply movement, too – animates an otherwise still, calm image, built on a bedrock of love.