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Here are the 10 things worth sharing this week:
RIP artist David Hockney. I’ve had this newspaper clipping above my desk in multiple studios over the years. There are so many photos of him looking joyous, smiling, but I like his look in this one because it says to me, “What are you doing with your life? Why aren’t you working?” The photo had a prominent spot on my bulletin board when I was writing Keep Going, and I quoted Hockney in the last chapter from the article the photo was clipped from: “I’ll go on until I fall over.” (He did just that! Working from a wheelchair.)
“The cause of death is birth,” he said. “The only real things in life are food and love in that order.” In the pit of the COVID pandemic, Hockney was a constant reminder: “Spring cannot be canceled.”
My friend Wendy shared a lovely tribute to Hockney, which included one of my favorite quotes of his: “You need the eye, the hand, and the heart. Two won’t do.” One of my fondest art memories is meeting Wendy at the de Young in San Francisco in 2014 to go see Hockney’s “A Bigger Picture” exhibition. That show left a huge impression on me.
“I wasn’t especially surprised,” Lawrence Weschler wrote of the death of his longtime friend and subject, “nor frankly was I all that saddened. If anything, as I kept telling the floodtide of sweet correspondents who kept showering me their heartfelt condolences across the days ahead, I was gladdened at the splendor of a life well-lived and the magnificence of a legacy well-left.” (I love Weschler’s book about Hockney.)
“[Hockney’s] work was an argument for seeing as a form of collage,” wrote art critic Jerry Saltz. “We don’t see the world all at once. We gather it piece by piece. We assemble it in our minds.” I think this is the biggest lesson I took from him: it’s all about looking. (If I were forced to pick a favorite work, it would probably be Pearblossom Highway.)Saltz said one more thing about Hockney that struck me: “It’s sort of astonishing how sophisticated Hockney’s art is while appearing effortless.” My friend Alan recently introduced me to the Italian word “sprezzatura,” which was defined in the 16th century by Baldassare Castiglione: “a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.” Bob Gill linked looking easy to inevitability: “however difficult it is to make art, it should always look easy, never labored.” And Maya Angelou said, “It must look easy, but it takes me forever to get it to look so easy.”
Mason Currey on the best book on writing he’s ever read. (I’d never heard of it! But I will check it out because I believe every writing book is good.)
Father’s Day is Sunday! If you need a last-minute gift for a veteran or expectant dad, I’d highly suggest one of the Hot New Releases in the “Fatherhood” category on Amazon: My book Don’t Call It Art!
You could also gift dad a subscription to