‘All work made Jack.’ That witticism no doubt also contains a truth. Not much success is achieved without a lot of effort. But there is a catch. Csikszentmihalyi quotes a psychiatrist, an Austrian named Viktor Frankl: ‘Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue.’ That is to say, if you do something that you are fitted for, that you love and are good at, success may (or may not) follow. But if you do that, you have succeeded in the most important respects anyway.

On one hand, effort is required success. Hockney’s own life proves that “All work made Jack”. But it’s possible the results of our effort is out of our control:

Clearly, when Hockney as a teenager in Bradford spent all day drawing, then all evening too, he could not have expected wealth and fame to be the result. In early 1950s Britain, very few artists were even able to make a living from their work alone. He tells several stories about his surprise when he first discovered that people were willing to pay money for his pictures. He defined his own notion of a life lived without regrets to Kristy Lang, who interviewed him for The Times in the spring of 2020: ‘I can honestly say that, for the last 60 years, every day I’ve done what I want to do. Not many people can that. I’ve been a professional artist. I didn’t even teach much, just painted and drew every single day.

Spring Cannot Be Cancelled is a philosophy book wearing an art book mask.

Gayford, Martin, and Hockney, David. Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy. United Kingdom, Thames & Hudson, 2021. pp204