Quest for Perfection : THAT’S THE WAY I SEE IT, <i> By David Hockney (Chronicle Books: $35; 248 pp.)</i>

Early in David Hockney’s new memoir, “That’s the Way I See It,” his first volume of reflections and reminiscences since an eponymous work in the late 1970s, one stumbles across a painting of extraordinary simplicity and haunting beauty. In it, an elderly man and woman sit together in an almost bare room, one hunched over a newspaper and indifferent to what is going on, the other slightly ill-at-ease and formally facing the painter; one wearing a rumpled brown suit, the other a contrasting blue dress; one in profile, the other head-on. The two are separated by an unpretentious sideboard on which rests a vase of tulips (a favorite motif of Hockney’s), along with a book of Chardin’s paintings and a mirror in which we see the partial reflection of a work of Piero della Francesca’s.

What kind of relationship exists between these people, who, the title of the painting tells us, are “My Parents”? Is their seeming obliviousness to each other a matter of familiarity or dislike? Is the visual simplicity of their world a comment on its emptiness or just designed to make us perceive the figures more clearly? And why has the artist chosen to place the mirror, with its tantalizing reflection and reference to Piero, dead center in the work, hinting at so many thoughts, so many universes, beyond that of the painting itself?

These questions have remained with me ever since I first saw the canvas at the monumental Hockney retrospective organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1988. It is a mark of how far Hockney has moved away from that painting and others of its era that its reproduction here takes up a mere three inches of space--a pity, for these earlier works seem, to this observer at least, so infinitely more subtle, so vastly more touching than his later efforts that the latter pale beside them.

It is the ideas that have led him away from that early naturalism toward a more complicated view of the world, influenced most notably by Picasso and Cubism, that are at the center of this book. A dominant refrain is Hockney’s increasing fascination with the methods of artistic reproduction. “Art reproduction has an effect on the art itself,” he notes. “When private museums are built, and built big, artists paint jumbo pictures to fit in them. When I bought a laser color printer it led me into ordering a hundred canvases 16 1/2 x 10 1/2 inches because that is the largest canvas that can go on a laser printer.”

With an engaging passion and curiosity, he talks about his discoveries and the voyages to Paris and China that contributed to them, about his “panoramic assault on Renaissance one-point perspective,” even occasionally about his sex life and his increasing deafness. Listening to Hockney speak in these taped interviews (compiled into one long narrative by Hockney’s collaborator, Nikos Stangos), it is impossible not to be drawn to him, just as it is impossible not to feel, despite all 248 pages of his thought, that little of great originality is said here.

While Hockney returns repeatedly to his central premise that naturalism means little any more and the conventions of photography even less, there is a casualness to his utterances that diminishes the impact of his ideas and sometimes makes them border frighteningly on the cliched. “What an artist is trying to do for people is bring them closer to something,” he tells us as if this is something new, “because of course art is about sharing: you wouldn’t be an artist unless you wanted to share an experience, a thought. I am constantly preoccupied with how to remove distance so that we can all come closer together, so that we can all begin to sense we are the same, we are one.”

Subtle insights are few here, just as is any depth of understanding when it comes to the verbal portrayal of Hockney’s world or that of his friends, who are frequently mentioned by name but who fade in and out of these pages like blots of invisible ink. One longs for some startling observation, some memorable elucidation, and simply doesn’t find it. Instead, we are taken on a pleasant journey through Hockney’s view of art, lovely but not tremendously profound.

And yet, in the midst of all this, there is one triumph: Hockney’s presentation of his theatrical designs and his discussion of the circumstances that led to their creation. From his side-by-side juxtaposition of Hogarth’s 1754 frontispiece to “Dr. Brook Taylor’s Methods of Perspective” with his own 1975 work “Kerby (After Hogarth) Useful Knowledge)”--the result of research Hockney did for a production of “The Rake’s Progress”--to his marvelously original contributions to “Turandot” and “Tristan and Isolde,” Hockney’s constant probing and relentless quest for perfection never cease to impress.

One may have mixed feelings about the direction much of this most accessible of modern artists’ work has taken, and one may find his comments here expressed with little stylistic merit, but his endless questioning and genuine delight in all the processes of creation make it difficult not to admire him.