David Hockney, the artist whose bold canvases became synonymous with British pop art and a certain Californian dream, died today at his home in Normandy. He was 87. The cause was complications from a stroke, his representatives confirmed. With his death, we lose the last great link to a generation that redefined painting in the age of mass media.
Hockney’s career was not a single arc but a series of reinventions. From the swimming pools of Los Angeles to the stark Yorkshire landscapes, his work always carried the same signature: a joy in the act of seeing. As a climate correspondent, I am struck by how his art captured the very essence of what we are now fighting to preserve. His sun-drenched pools, with their shimmering, rippling surfaces, are not just reflections of leisure but monuments to a specific, pre-apocalyptic abundance of water and energy. He painted the world as if it would never run out of light.
He was born in Bradford in 1937, the son of a clerk. His early work already showed a compulsion to experiment: from the photocollages that sliced time into frozen instants, to the intricate stage sets for the Royal Opera House. But it was his move to California in 1964 that catalysed his most famous works. ‘A Bigger Splash’ (1967) is perhaps the quintessential Hockney: a moment of liquid chaos frozen against the flat, geometric backdrop of a modernist house. The splash is not just a splash; it is an event, a tiny, man-made catastrophe of order and chaos. It is, in its way, a kind of climate event: a sudden, localised disruption of the norm.
His later shift to digital drawing on the iPad in the 2010s astounded critics. At an age when most retreat, he embraced the new. The glowing screens of his digital paintings were not a departure but a continuation. He always used the tools of his time to see more clearly. He once said, “The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you’re an artist.” And he was never a cheat. His colours were always honest: acid greens, electric blues, yellows so hot they hurt. He painted a world that was, at its core, a celebration of the physical, the tactile, the here and now.
That physicality is exactly what makes his loss so poignant. We live in an age of digital ephemera, but Hockney’s work was always about the handmade mark. Even his iPad drawings, when printed, were treated with ink on paper. He insisted that the hand mattered. In a heating world, that insistence feels almost radical. It is a reminder that the biosphere we are losing is not an abstract set of data but a world of colour, of sensation, of splashes on hot concrete.
His legacy is not just the images themselves but the way he taught us to look. Hockney saw the world as a stage, a tapestry of moving light. He painted the trees in a way that captured their light and their weight, their defiance of gravity. He gave us a vocabulary for seeing the beauty in the everyday: a garden hose left in the sun, the pattern of light on water, the awkward angles of a face. He showed us that the world is worth painting because it is worth saving.
Today, the art world mourns. But for those of us who report on the slow unravelling of the planet, Hockney’s work remains a testament to what we stand to lose. He painted a world of plenty, of 30-degree pool water, of blazing sun. He did not flinch from the brightness. Now, as the real world heats up, his paintings become elegy and warning. He gave us a vision of Eden. It is up to us to keep it from becoming an archipelago of empty pools and ghost lawns.
Hockney’s final work, ‘The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate Woods’, finished this January, shows a canopy of trees just beginning to bud. The green is almost acidic, the air thick with potential. It is a painting about return, about the cycle that keeps us alive. He was, until the very end, an artist of the living world.
