Exercise: Annotate a Portrait - Part 4, Project 1

The portrait I have chosen for this exercise is one that I have seen for myself in the Tate (London), by one of my favourite painters, David Hockney. Called simply "My Parents" it is a large canvas, almost square, with the two subjects portrayed almost life-size.

The Tate describes Hockney's style in this painting as changing towards a "closer study of human behaviour". The question I would like to address in this annotation is "Whose behaviour - Hockney's or his parents'?" as the painting is not of the personal space inhabited by Mr and Mrs Hockney but that of Hockney himself.

"My Parents" (1977), David Hockney, 183 x 183cm Oil on Canvas,

• The first things that strikes me about “My Parents” is that portraits are normally of the subject's own surroundings, in their study or in their formal sitting-room, but this is a portrait of a couple on their son's turf, with their son's furniture and books and not their own.
  
  
• It seems like quite a calm scene, yet I feel a bit of tension. The parents are quite far apart, one reading intently and the other being very well-behaved and co-operative. Did they get along? Are we to read differences in their personality here – one being placid and the other not?
  
  
• The colours used in “My Parents” are mostly on the cool spectrum, blues, greens and lilacs with touches of reds in his father's clothes and in the areas of flesh on both of them; as well as the vivid yellows and pinks of the tulips. This helps the painting feel calm, quiet and orderly. There is a similarity with the background colours of “Oath of the Horatii (1784) by David.
  
  
• David Hockney is on record as saying that he believes, like Picasso, “you can't have art without play”. He believes a sense of playfulness is essential to all activities, as he equates it with curiosity. In an interview after his father's death, he said, “In a certain sense, one only makes pictures for oneself. I work on the assumption that if something I am doing interests me it might interest someone else; but I can't be bothered too much if it doesn't, as long as it interests me.” 
   
• What does this painting say about Hockney's sense of playfulness, his curiosity? Certainly there are plenty of clues. The vase of tulips, as in a traditional vanitas painting, may be an acceptance that life is finite; that his parents were coming to the end of their lives. (He wasn't to know that his father would be dead within six months of this sitting), or it could have been placed there to tell us something about his mother's love of flowers and home life, in an homage to Dutch Still Life paintings. 
   
• The books on the shelf of the artist's studio table could signify that he likes to keep these books on hand (the table is on castors and can be moved around). By including all the volumes of Proust's “Remembrance of Things Past”, is Hockney remembering all his own memories of life with his parents, or is the placement of this book an acknowledgement that his parents have many happy memories of a life they have described as “rich”, I wonder. Proust was also interested in descriptive space. He viewed the study of the things we surround ourselves with as the way to understanding our inner life. The book on Chardin, famous for his depictions of people in their intimate spaces rather than the usual-for-the-time narrative allegories may be there to show that Hockney wanted this portrait to say more about how he viewed painting than about being an intimate one of his parents in their own space. Was the use of precise measurement and geometry in the painting also emphasised by the choice of the painting hanging on the studio wall and visible in the reflection from the mirror – Piero della Francesca's “Baptism of Christ” (right).
  
  Piero della Francesca was known to be an authority on perspective and geometry in his time, but he was also noted for being one of the first artists to paint descriptive space rather than pictorial space.
  
  
  
• The book being read by Hockney's father is also significant ( Aaron Scharf's “Art and Photography”) as Hockney made his own views on the subject clear in his 2001 book, “Secret Knowledge”. He makes the connection between the development of optics and the development of representational painting, and stresses that it was not so much a connection as a condition.
   
• In conclusion I feel that this portrait of his parents says much more about what David Hockney thinks about art and painting than it does about his parents; because it is his space that his parents are inhabiting, his studio with his books, his paintings on the studio wall and his chairs. It is Hockney's inner life that we learn about here, what is important to him, not an intimate look at the behaviour of his parents.