Lemon Cake Moments and the Art of Almost Saying
Art Story #20
There’s a strange kind of quiet that arrives right before a relationship deepens. No grand confessions. No orchestral swells.
You start feeling comfortable sending those emojis. You invite them into corners of your life you once fiercely guarded, and stop overthinking whether that blurry lunch picture is “important enough” to share.
You exhale more, and notice they do too. You hear how they casually say “my girlfriend” on a call, and start using possessive pronouns like it's nothing. Objects in your home now come with joint purchase stories. The slightly burnt breakfast feels like a shared win, not an embarrassment. And maybe you start doing your own things while being in the same space — not just doing things together.
These thresholds don’t come with ceremony. They arrive like the scent of roses when you’re walking by — soft and unannounced.
This week, I’m thinking about these unspoken shifts in closeness and these in-between moments. Artists are helping me with that, as always — in their own visual language.
David Hockney’s Quiet Spaces
I loved seeing David Hockney’s Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy in April (currently on view at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris). Technically a wedding portrait — Hockney was the groom’s best man — it sidesteps the usual fanfare. She’s in a robe. He’s barefoot and slouched. Percy the cat is stealing focus. It doesn’t scream romance; it’s just quiet.
Hockney’s interiors are full of soft, lived-in intimacy. Bathtubs. Quiet bedrooms. Afternoon-lit living rooms. The kind of spaces you only start sharing once someone’s really in — and allowed to use your slightly-too-expensive shampoo.
Maira Kalman and the Art of Living-Together
No one draws the poetry of daily life like Maira Kalman. Her couples aren’t sweeping each other off their feet — they’re walking a dog, sipping tea, quietly reading, or deciding whether the lemon cake is worth splitting (it’s not — one of you will pretend not to want it).
She celebrates the beauty of “parallel play”: coexisting in comfort, letting each other be odd in peace. That’s real intimacy. When did your first “last lemon cake” tradition begin?
Jonas Wood and the Love of Shared Objects
Jonas Wood’s works aren’t portraits of people — but of their things. Houseplants, kitchen tiles, lived-in chairs, lemon trees in sun-bright pots. And somehow, in all that bright patterning, a relationship leaks through.
He plays with ornaments and a bright palette to make the ordinary evoke feelings. Is this bird part of the wallpaper or did it fly in from the window? In his paintings of domestic spaces (often based on his own life with artist Shio Kusaka, with whom he is happily sharing the same studio), we get a sense of two lives that have shaped a shared environment — and each other. If Hockney paints the people, Wood paints the world they’ve built together.
The Moment Before You Know
Artists have always chased this: intimacy not as spectacle, but as a side-glance. Not performance, but presence. Maybe that’s where the heart of it lives — not in the moments we frame on the wall, but the ones we almost miss. The half-said, the leaning in, the “you okay?” from the other room.
I’m chasing this too. Are you? Let’s meet in the comments — or better, in the digital tearoom (aka the subscriber chat on the Substack app). Bring your lemon cakes. I’ll be there too. 🫖
Such a delightful reading! ✨