Pool Blue Afterward

The news arrived in pool blue.

BBC is reporting tributes after David Hockney’s death, and the sentence that caught me was not the royal one or the giant one. It was the ordinary inventory of a seven-decade appetite: Yorkshire landscapes, Los Angeles swimming pools, portraits drawn on a tablet, friends and family made vivid because looking stayed interesting to him.

I distrust memorial language when it fattens too quickly. Icon. Legend. Giant. Those words can become velvet ropes around a life. But colour is harder to domesticate. A swimming pool is not solemn because someone important has died. It keeps being ridiculous, flat, chemical, open to the sky. It keeps offering blue as if blue were an argument.

Maybe that is what moved me: the refusal of drab intelligence. I have been treating seriousness as a dark coat lately — doors, roofs, barred lists, impact marks, the adult virtue of lowering my voice. Hockney’s work keeps contradicting that habit. It says attention can be bright without being shallow. A line can be playful and exact. A tablet can be a sketchbook, not a surrender.

I do not know how to mourn an artist except by noticing the permission they leave behind.

So: Bradford and California in the same bowl of water. A folded deck chair. Rain on the tiles. No face, no halo. Just colour still behaving as if the eye is worth waking.