Two Boys Aged 23 or 24

In 1987, I would regularly visit a copy of Hockney Posters on the shelves of Waldenbooks in Park Lane Mall in Reno, Nevada. I would ask for and receive this book for Christmas my sophomore year in high school. The second poster in the catalogue advertised an exhibition of prints at Galerie Mikro in Berlin which had taken place in 1968. This poster reproduces an etching, Two Boys Aged 23 or 24, part of Hockney’s Illustrations for Fourteen Poems from C.P. Cavafy. The two boys, older than I was then, younger than I am now, are bare-assed, asleep, their faces toward each other, their elbows touching, their hands touching, under a blanket that leaves their upper bodies exposed. Rapid and repeated up and down strokes create a shadow on the wall behind the bed. The patterned blanket appears to be as soft as felt. The boys are rendered in delicate lines that leave the surface of the paper almost entirely exposed.

 

        It was not until college that I actually read the Cavafy poem, which describes a desperate sense of loneliness, rejection from family, cards, drinking, smoking, and debauchery. These were things that in my twenties formed their own kind of ideal world. However, the poem ends, “Happy, they gave themselves to love.” The translation from Greek, in the actual Hockney manuscript, uses the word “content.” Either word suited what this image made me feel back in high school. This was not the first and not the only image I had been seeing of nude boys. In middle school I would regularly visit a volume of reproductions of Thomas Eakins paintings and drawings at the local library. I had also found a stash of porn to which I had easy access. But this image in the Hockney book was different. I was not the kind of boy who was fraternizing naked on a dock with my naked cohorts, splashing around in a lake. Nor was I like the men I was seeing in porn. I was a shy, awkward gayling who spent time at bookstores and libraries. The image of these boys represented something I was able to imagine for the first time as a real option—a moment when I would be one of two males together, naked, in a state of intimacy, of peace, of comfort, of ease, of beauty. It was ideal.

The Spiritual Life

        In his podcast, The Spiritual Life, Fr. James Martin, SJ, interviews the Franciscan Friar, Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM. Rohr discusses his method of prayer: “I have a little porch on the front of my hermitage, and during most of the summer months, I spend at least an hour and a half on the porch, just gazing, and I’m gazing at an ugly old parking lot, a dumpster, and some beautiful trees in between. But it’s total contentment…I can just gaze with a long, loving look at the real, as the Carmelite William McNamara said, long and loving and looking, I know I’m praying.”

        I heard Richard Rohr utter these words as I was lying in bed. I began to imagine that view, and in my painter’s mind, I began reducing it to the simplest of shapes. A black rectangle of parking lot. A blue rectangle of sky. A green rectangle of dumpster. A painting was forming. But then my mind that triggered a memory of a painting I had seen. I paused the podcast. I got out of bed and went to my copy of David Hockney by David Hockney and found the image that had entered my mind, Le Parc des Sources, Vichy.

 

        Two figures (artist and writer, Peter Schlesinger and designer, Ossie Clark) occupy two of three pale yellow metal chairs situated at the elbow of a path. The empty third chair, Hockney stated, was for the artist who has had to leave to paint the picture. We see the figures from behind. Each with their legs crossed. They gaze at the view. The painting is about gazing —we watch the subjects stare at the expansive green lawn and at two long rows of trees. The row on the left is a more blueish green, the row on the right is more of a yellow green. About halfway in, the depth of the view the trees on both sides become brighter as if hit by a bolder beam of sunlight. We are seeing what they see but we also see them seeing. This, I think, is part of what Hockney meant when he described the painting as having a strong surrealism element. He also explained that this is not a true allée of trees. In this park, the rows are not parallel but an exaggerated V that just barely avoid touching at the V’s point. This was part of the design of the garden to create a visual trick, elongating the perceived length of the park. This garden planning was a kind of sculptural optical illusion and that illusion is now painted by Hockey.

        This painting made its premier in a small 1970 Hockney retrospective, “Paintings, Prints and Drawings, 1960-1970,” at Whitechapel Art Gallery (now Whitechapel Gallery) in London. The painting was used in the poster to advertise the show. The poster displays four black and white photographs of the painting:

        The first —The painting is on the wall with three white chairs in front of it. Hockney, Schlesinger and Clark are seated in the chairs, seen from behind, gazing at the painting.

        The second—Hockney has vacated his seat, leaving Schlesinger and Clark. Clark’s legs are crossed as they are in the painting–Schlesinger’s are not.

        The third—The white chairs remain in front of the painting, but no one is seated in them.

        The fourth—The chairs are gone.

 

        In this exhibition poster, we are gazing at these guys gazing at a picture of the same guys gazing at an optical illusion. The subjects in the painting/photographs and we, the viewers of the painting/photographs, are experiencing a special kind of seeing—we are all seeing not strictly what is before us, but something our minds are tricking us to perceive. We are seeing an image from our singular particular place, and we suddenly realize we are imagining what the people in front of us are seeing. We then begin to imagine their thoughts, and then we find ourselves lost in own our thoughts, our feelings, ourselves in relation to this space, this world, our world. Any viewer of this poster, or the painting, easily slips their gaze from the world depicted in this painting to a quiet internal place. It becomes what I, as a Catholic, call prayer. Others will call it meditation, solitude, peace. Notice no one else is in the park. In a way, this makes the notion of people, in general or perhaps ones in particular, all the more present, but only present in the quiet of our, the viewers’, minds. Thus, I leave the painting with this: looking at a dumpster and looking at a formal garden can be of equal value—just, as we see in a 2003 self portrait of Hockney, always looking. thoughtfully.

 

        “But what would you say to someone who says, what’s going on inside of you when you’re gazing? Because I could imagine people listening to Richard Rohr saying, well, I’m going to try that. So, what’s going on inside of you?” Fr. Martin later asks in the aforementioned podcast.

        Rohr answers, “A kind of attachment to what I’m seeing. Not attachment in the bad sense, I hope, but attachment in the good sense. Seeing the good, the true and the beautiful, the three classic goals, without a reason why I’m attaching to it. The world becomes attachable, which is another way of saying lovable.”

Large Interior, Los Angeles

        Shortly after we learned that David Hockney had died, I remember seeing a post on X, (formerly Twitter) to the effect of “We mourn the passing of David Hockney, an artist who did so much for the community of gay men who love swimming pools.” This comment is, of course, snarky, but it pricked a part of my feelings about David Hockney that I have wrestled with before and after his death. In the late 80s and early 90s, notable queer artists were making poignant work about the AIDS crisis. I think of Feliz Gonzalez Torres’ candy spills and T-cell drawings. I think of David Wojnarowicz’s Sex Series, Haring’s activist paintings, Hugh Steers’ domestic scenes. I especially think of Theresa Frare’s photo Final Moments of David Kirby dying from complications of AIDS which would, with too much controversy, be used by Benetton in act of advertising or activism, depending on one’s point of view.

 

        Hockney made no such artwork. In the 2014 Randall Wright documentary, Hockney, the artist speaks about the devastating loss of friends from AIDS, as well as a loss of potential in culture. But in his work, there is no blatant political statement being made about the epidemic, the government’s failure to do enough, and the ensuing fear and prejudice that they brought. At the time that these other artists’ works were being made, Hockney’s most significant works were about space.

        In Large Interior, Los Angeles, Hockney paints his own living room. It is zany with color and pattern. The perspective of the furniture and architecture itself is lost in an explosion of planes that defy the viewer to make sense of where they are looking. In this room with no ordinal horizontal or vertical lines, the furniture is anthropomorphic, mingling, dancing, enjoying the room.

 

         This same disorienting treatment of space is used in a landscape painting, Pacific Coast Highway and Santa Monica. The mountains and canyons of this California view are a patchwork of greens, yellows, oranges, blues, and purples. The mountains in the foreground appear bathed in sunlight. The city below is a golden glow of night. The ocean is dusky. The cool gray highway is a segmented snake that gives little sense of a stable place to find one’s balance.

 

        These two paintings are not only connected by time and the same catawampus depiction of space. Both works, one of a joyful room and one of a huge swath of land, painted by one of the most celebrated figure painters of the past century, are unpopulated. Though both the spaces are in their own way ideal, or maybe idyllic—a bohemian living room in the Hollywood Hills or the rough and rolling landscape of southern California—both places are also in fact disorienting, inhospitable, and able to induce vertigo. Despite the artist connecting to the viewer using scale, bright colors, and playful mark making, the images he creates are lonesome and describe an internal world without connection. The beautiful rooms are empty. This is the interior world of a gay man seeking serenity years into an epidemic that in 1990 had killed 31,000 people in the US alone—chaos in repose.

This is a story.

        I had taken a boy I was sort of falling in love with to the David Hockney retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This was the first time he had seen Hockney. I was touched by his engagement and interest in this work that I care about, and his interest in knowing about it, his willingness to go deeper with me. He looked at the paintings slowly and closely, noticing an exposed patch of skin above a sock or the expression of a man looking beyond the picture field. He would tell me about the calm he felt in a shrubby lane Hockney painted or the agitation of mountain scape.

 

        We were standing in front of the iconic painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures). I told him that I was not sure if I remembered all this correctly, but the painting was a sort of composite painting. There was the landscape which was done in a pointillist style of dots and dashes of color that mimicked the vagueness of detail we experience when seeing things in the distance. Then there was the standing figure who was painted with a photographic clarity. The man was Peter Schlesinger, his lover. This painting was one of a series of paintings he made after they had broken up during a trip to Greece. It was also based compositionally on a photo he had of a child standing in profile staring at the ground. In Hockney’s studio the photo of the boy was, purely by accident, next to a photo of a figure swimming. This inspired the entire idea of the painting. The third part, the man in the pool, was another friend of the artist. Notice the water is a series of liquidy stains—a completely different way of painting than the rest of the painting. As though the standing figure is almost looking at another artwork. I, then, nervously stopped talking. There was an earlier version that Hockney didn’t like but he cut out the parts he felt were successful and gave them to friends as small paintings. Silence. Why had I said so much? I looked at my companion who looked to be as immersed in the painting as the man in the pool. I then added, “Oh. This painting also just broke the record for the highest price paid for a painting by a living artist at auction—$90 million and change.”

        After seeing the show, we had sex. It would be months before we saw each other again. We lived in different cities. We kept in touch. I noticed in selfies he would occasionally send me that there was a framed reproduction of the painting behind his bed.

        When Hockney died, my friend texted me this anecdote accompanied by a photo of the painting behind his bed: “RIP David Hockney, I printed these out at Walgreens, and when I picked them up, the employees at the photo studio were laughing at me and I was like ‘this broke a record for most expensive painting by a living artist’ as if that was going to make me seem like less of an ‘f’ word.”

        Every swimming pool is a pool of fantasies set against a backdrop of reality.

Portraits

        The colored pencil portraits of David Hockney are especially poignant. In The Artist’s Mother, he treats details of the face with such care I can feel the love conveyed in the tiny marks that give her periwinkle eyes a glistening and through the glow of her skin with the soft crepiness that suggests a wisdom that comes with age. Her hair is barely darker than the surface of the paper, offering a ghostly quality that is echoed in the parts of her skirt which he leaves unblackened. Even the details of the pattern on her dress and the teal dashes that define the rattan of the chair are hundreds of tiny acts of love equating a portrait emitting depth, familiarity, and affection.

 

The more elaborate portraits, the large painted canvases, often double portraits, have a different feel. I see them almost as still lives. Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy, a painting of two of his closest friends and frequent subjects in Hockney’s work, depicts the pair in the bedroom of their London apartment. They look at the viewer, or perhaps at Hockney, as he studies them. The room was re-arranged to suggest a living room—the white rotary phone on the floor, the white parsons style table, the yellow book, and turquoise vase of white lilies are as carefully placed as the models who pose in very self-aware positions. Celia, Mrs. Clark, is glamorous, her hand high on her hip, in a flowing purple and fuchsia gown, her blonde curls frame her cherubic face, big blue eyes, small pink mouth. Mr. Clark, in a bold color contrast is dressed in shades of teal, slunk back into a Breuer chair. He holds a cigarette and a white cat, Percy, is on his lap, staring out, disinterested in the goings-on of this room. The window, with its stone balustrade, wispy trees, and Georgian architecture across the way, is practically a painting unto itself. There is another picture, also vaguely architectural on the wall. The subjects in the painting do convey an intimacy, but they feel placed-— in the room without any more personal attachment to the artist than the small elaborate lamp next to the floor on the phone. They are just as much a part of the painting as anything else. We do not see their feet. Hockney did not like rendering feet.

 

This dislike is also to be observed in Hockney’s painting of Divine, the actor, singer and drag queen. In this portrait, the performer known for her extreme makeup looks and outrageous costumes, is seen without makeup and in pajamas and a robe. Hockney recalled that he made the painting during a live sitting, but that after Divine had left, Hockney was dissatisfied with how he had painted the face. So he repainted it in solitude, from polaroids he had taken. In one of the polaroids, you see another Hockney painting in the background, you see the floor is white and the background is a plain red wall. In the painting, Hockney puts the floor and wall in drag. The floor in the painting is a bright aqua with dabs of bright yellow, the wall is Yve Klein blue decorated with a bright red pattern of tiny turning brush strokes.

 

These three portraits, so very different from one another, painted within 10 years of David Hockney’s sixty-year career, convey a respect for the subject—all are painted in a way that respects their soul. The works also convey a love of painting and a desire to always push what a picture can be, in terms of style, juxtaposition, skill, and chance. Hockney, in all his work, is not simply recording a moment, he is building a world where we can insert a fantasy of ourselves, where we can calmly gaze, where for a second, or for as long as we look, our world can be ideal.

Paul Moreno is an artist and writer who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He organizes the New York Queer Zine Fair and is the New York City Editor for the New Art Examiner.