A few nights ago I was chatting to a friend about summer plans, and she mentioned that her first priority was trying to schedule time to visit her mother, who lives in a different country. I recalled that she had recently made the long trip for her mother’s birthday, and asked if everything was OK with her ageing parent. Yes, my friend explained, but after the long stretch of lockdown when no one had been allowed to travel, she now felt an urgent need to see her mother more. And since her mother had no desire to relocate, my friend was simply having to make more long-distance flights, even though she didn’t like the constant travel and her life was busy between her own work and raising her own children here in New York, thousands of miles away.
I could relate to that. My own mother lives just a train ride away but, over the past year, I too have found myself feeling the urge to visit her more and more — even if, during those visits, it takes only a casual comment from her to make me feel like an annoyed teenager all over again. As I get older, I’ve been increasingly reminded that she’s getting older too, and regardless of the sometimes challenging dynamics of our relationship, I have an inner compulsion to spend more time with her. It’s made me think about how delicate and complicated that relationship can be between parent and child, and how it changes over a lifetime.
In David Hockney’s double portrait “My Parents” (1977), the British artist paints a domestic scene that one imagines reflects his view of the central aspects of his parents’ personalities, and how he understood the relationship between them. The artist’s father, his head bent over a magazine in his lap, is slightly more in the foreground of the canvas, although his attention is clearly directed away from the artist, the viewer and his own wife seated beside him in the picture. His feet are not fully on the floor, as though he were restless and impatient to be released. This is a person fully in his own world, despite being in the presence of his family.
Hockney’s mother sits upright on the left of the canvas, feet together on the floor, hands folded in her lap and fully attentive to her son, the painter. Her expression is dutiful and accommodating, as though she is used to this role. A green wheeled sideboard stands between them. On its surface is a tray with a vase of flowers and a table mirror. In the reflection we can see a partial view of a small replica of a painting on the opposite wall, Piero della Francesca’s “Baptism of Christ”. On the bottom shelf is a stack of books, including one on the 18th-century artist Jean-Siméon Chardin, who was renowned for his own seemingly simple paintings of domestic scenes that were yet charged with emotional energy.
This image shows a couple together in a way that has proved sustainable yet also maybe distant, with a hint of some unspoken dissatisfaction or sadness. Hockney, born in 1937, painted this when he was 40 years old. But he had started a portrait two years earlier called “My Parents and Myself”, which included his own image in the mirror. He abandoned that painting, which upset both parents.
It makes me wonder how Hockney might have painted his parents when he was 20, barely a man, just learning to experience the ups and downs of adulthood — or at 60. For most of us, the way we view our parents, their relationship to one another and to us, changes as we go through our own life experiences.
When I turned 31 or 32, I remember realising that I was the same age my mother had been when she made a decision to take her life and ours in a new direction, eventually moving to a new country. I had a completely different perspective on my mother and that situation than I had ever had before. When we are children, we believe that our parents have all the power and limitless choices in the distant adult world they occupy. Now there was room for a bit more compassion in my evaluation, because by then I had experienced what it was like to be an adult not fully in control of life’s circumstances.
How might any of us paint portraits of our own parents at our current stage of our lives versus when we were younger? What would we include? How would we illustrate the way we imagine them in relation to ourselves?
I was struck by the arresting work “Melanie and Me Swimming” (1978-79) by British painter Michael Andrews. Based on a photograph of the artist and his daughter, the image shows a father waist-deep in a river teaching his young child how to swim. The father’s attention is concentrated on his child as he grips her by the arms, steadying her as she splashes her small legs. Thick wisps of brown hair fall into her face as she smiles, terrified and delighted simultaneously. The water is dark, and we can barely see what lies beneath.
There is so much metaphor in this painting for how we make it through life. Even though this child could probably stand at this shallow depth, she still looks to her father to guide her, as she may in the future when she is far from firm ground. But she may not always have that support. At times she will have to rely on herself. This is a swimming lesson but it’s also a lesson in survival.
Yet what is so terrifying and moving about this image is how it speaks to another courageous aspect of parenting. Again and again, you must release your child into an unknown world where you simply don’t have the means or control to protect them. This can happen at any time in a child’s life, including for adult children who because of developmental issues or life choices might still need active support and parenting. And some parents face this terror on a more consistent basis because of how the world is socialised to see and treat children that look like theirs.
“Smile II” by Shaina McCoy, a 30-year-old Minneapolis-based artist, is a small 5-inch by 7-inch painting, but I was immediately drawn to it as I walked through her current New York exhibition, The Gaze. Two little girls are facing one another. One child is dressed in a colourful polka-dotted tank top and mauve shorts, her braided hair held by a pink barrette. She holds a camera up to her eyes and kneels in front of the other child, a toddler dressed in a white shift dress falling off one shoulder, taking her picture.
McCoy does not paint faces on her figures, but we still get the sense of an intimate scene of both play and life-training. There is something beautiful about this moment of both children looking and being looked at. The mutual gaze holds a recognition of belonging, of safety, of feeling valued enough to be gazed upon with interest and care.
There are no parents in this painting, but parenting is hinted at by the careful way the young child is dressed, the camera someone has taught her to use, and the toddler she knows to care for even in play. We can intimate that someone has conveyed to this little photographer something about self-value, about finding beauty in faces like hers and her sister’s, and in taking time to look and see another person.
But there is also something poignant and wrenching about parenting in this image. The sense that no matter how we raise our children to value themselves or to see beauty in the world, the world will not always return a similar loving gaze. This will be true for a lot of parent figures, but even more so for many parents of black children — especially in the US, where the news regularly reminds us that we live in a society that does not always treat our children with the regard in which we see them or have trained them to see themselves.
I love the fact that McCoy keeps her figures faceless. The discipline would be to imagine seeing any child as valuable and to be able to extend care to them regardless of what they look like or to whom they belong.
This painting also makes me think of the fact that we are all children of someone. And there are ways in which we still carry within us the children we were, the ways in which we were taught to be in the world, and the lessons we learnt, for good and for ill, from parents as human as we find our own adult selves to be.
What we do with those teachings and lessons is the parenting we all have to learn to do on ourselves. Sometimes this means revisiting the ways we were raised and recognising which of the lessons we picked up from our parents are keeping us from life-giving patterns and relationships now. Sometimes it means remembering and reclaiming the powerful and positive teachings that remind us of who we can be in the world, despite what the world suggests or demands of us.
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