David Hockney, the painter who reshaped how we see colour and perspective, was laid to rest today in a private ceremony in Yorkshire. The funeral, strictly no-fly and no-camera, felt less like an ending and more like a pause: a ripple in the fabric of British cultural memory. The silence was palpable, broken only by the wind across the dales.
Among the black-clad mourners, figures from the National Gallery, the Royal Academy, and 10 Downing Street stood in quiet solidarity. Hockney's work, from the sun-drenched Californian pools to the luminous Yorkshire landscapes, chronicled a world in vivid flux. His passing marks the close of a chapter: the last of the great British modernists.
But his legacy will persist in the pigment of every canvas he touched, a reminder of the urgent, joyful duty of seeing. The planet keeps warming, the ice keeps melting, but today, we stopped to remember a man who taught us to look before it is too late.
