In 2018, David Hockney visited Normandy. He was so moved by the experience, the landscape, the colors that he relocated there in 2019. In 2020, after twelve summers in New York, three months of lockdown, and four weeks of relentless, futile protest, I departed for my then-girlfriend’s parents’ cottage in Amagansett. It was sumptuous, jammed with fragrance, dense with topiary, specimen trees.
Things were still tenuous when my soon-to-be mother-in-law attended the superspreader Chainsmokers concert, and people remained distanced, services limited and polite, or at worst sympathetic. Everyone looked sorrowful and more gorgeous, eyes being uncanny reverent portals to the soul, chins being iffy at best. But by the second Covid summer, things had settled, our genetic compositions transformed en masse courtesy of Pfizer and Moderna. Pickleball courts were once again packed, and Hockney’s show, Ma Normandie, opened at the Pace Gallery pop-up in East Hampton.
I was still unemployed, would remain so until the Biden administration cut off benefits that September, and strolled the quiet streets, browsing LVIS, eyeing fresh fish at Stewart’s, collecting free books from the library basement. One afternoon, I went to see Hockney’s new paintings. They were, in fact, prints—nonetheless stunning in their high-contrast inkjet. As the press release explained, the works “invite viewers to see the power of nature as the world outside continues to blossom and spring gives away to the summer.”
Fittingly, the show was open for only ten days, that famous Memorial week-and-a-half when the Empire State is comfortable without a jacket, and not yet painfully humid. Hockney captured the light with immaculate effect. Three pieces had been composed on his iPad. It was cozy, authentic. I felt how much money can insulate one from disaster. I could’ve stayed in that dream forever. And when I finally left, the years just rolled themselves up. I got a job at a grocery store as though they’d never happened.
-David Fishkind