HOWARD HODGKIN

Howard Hodgkin was born in 1932. He decided to become a painter when he was just five years old, and after a lifetime of teaching and painting he is now widely regarded as one of the most significant artists at work in Britain today. Renowned for his mastery of colour, Hodgkin was’ awarded the Turner Prize in 1965, was knighted in 1992 and has been the subject of many major retrospective exhibitions around the world, including a survey at the Tate London in 2006.
Hodgkin was a frequent traveller to South Asia, and he has an extensive collection of pictures painted on the Indian subcontinent. He collaborated closely with the architect Charles Correa in the production of the magnificent mural for the front façade of the British Council’s premises in India.
Hodgkin is principally known as a painter. By his own definition, he paints representational pictures of emotional situations, with events and emotions recalled and re-presented as spatial and formal experiments. So although there is a temptation to read Hodgkin’s bold, gelid swathes of colour as eccentric abstraction, the images are in fact firmly rooted in emotion-rich experience, and memories, drawn from the artist’s own life.
Hodgkin himself has described his subject matter as ‘simple and straightforward’ — indeed, one critic describes his work in quite mundane terms: ‘It ranges from views through windows, landscapes, occasional still lifes, to memories of holidays, encounters with interiors and art collections, other people, other bodies, love affairs, sexual encounters and emotional situations of all kinds, even eating’[1]
Hodgkin sees himself as a representational painter, not a painter of appearances: ‘I paint representations of emotional situations”. It has often been said that he sets out to paint not what the world looks like but what it feels like. Hardly surprising then that his hundreds of paintings have been interpreted as the products of a painter’s heart and mind, a chaos of emotions and memories.
His paintings seem like jumbled memories of people and places. Maybe this is his very point — Hodgkin does not merely explore the fringes where what we feel touches what we see; rather he shows us a world where emotion is superimposed on vision, where feeling totally distorts perceptions. He depicts a weird world – the weird, real world we all experience.
In Hodgkin’s paintings travel and places, and people in places, are recurring themes. The titles often indicate the precise locations, the rooms and identities of the individuals in them. His paintings transport you there, and you experience the meeting, the landscape, the interior, the emotion. It is always a bold and startling encounter.
Throughout his life Hodgkin has continually explored the possibilities of printmaking. Over the course of half a century, Hodgkin has produced more than 140 print editions, experimenting with material, technique and scale to create a substantial body of work, as accomplished as his works in oil.

This Exhibition

This exhibition, drawn from the holdings of the British Council Collection in UK, presents you with an opportunity to experience key examples from Hodgkin’s print oeuvre alongside the significant oil painting ‘StiI Life in a Restaurant’ (1973).
The painting and original prints on display are a chaos of abstract forms – splashes, blobs, dots, shapes and clashes of bright, bold colours which now merge, now separate, seemingly without logic or reason. They mingle with each other, abut each other. Haphazard brushstrokes or precisely configured? Are they violent or peaceful? Do the shapes merge or clash? Are the images captured in the moment or are they in a state of flux? Stable or unstable?Certain or uncertain?Questions or statements?
As a painter, Hodgkin builds layer upon layer of expressive and vivid colour. Printmaking, as such, is not a departure for the artist but a natural extension of his own tendency to accumulate and build emotion on emotion. We can witness the successful translation – the continuation – of his distinctive style of painting to his graphic work.
This exhibition includes Hodgkin’s very first professional print ‘B nter Laughing’ produced in 1964, when Hodgkin was one of 25 young artists invited to make screenprints with the master printer Chris Prater of keipra Studio, London. Between 1966 and 1968 Hodgkin created several lithographs with Editions Alecto and in the early seventies, working with Maurice Payne at Petersburgh Press, he was introduced to intaglio printing processes, such as etching and aquatint, a practice further honed with master printerJackShirreff at 107 Workshop.
Hodgkin has described his printmaking as an alternative, as an escape, from the solitude of the studio.
Making prints necessarily involves the participation of other people, and it also invites experimentation.
He has even made a feature of hand-colouring many of the prints — providing, as Pat Gilmour explains, a ‘solution for achieving something comparable to the energy, intensity and saturation of his paintings’[2]
There is a striking consistency in Hodgkin’s painting and printmaking processes. Printmaking calls upon the artist to be both slow and spontaneous, working in multiple layers, accumulating brushstrokes and mark-making in vivid colours, to create anch and expressive image.
In painting and print alike, Hodgkin’s works are characterised by deep emotion and bold gesture.
Enjoy the gestures. Feel the emotions.

Robin Davies

British Council

[1] Interview with John Tusa, BBC Radio 3, May 2000

[2] Pat Gilmour, Howard Hodgkin’, The Print Collectors Newsletter, vol. XII, March – April 1981, p.3

HOWARD HODGKIN

Howard Hodgkin doesn’t really like making prints or, at least, he says he doesn’t, and I believe him. It’s understandable really. If he’s making a painting, he can do it whenever he likes — when the inspiration comes — and if it turns out wrong, he can just destroy it and no-one else is any the wiser. The evidence is gone. The trouble with prints is that you have to work with other people and that means working at appointed times and you may just not be in the mood. And they take so long to make – the thinking, the mark-making and then the proofing and the printing and the editioning. It can take years from beginning to end, not to mention the signing and numbering and the endless discussions about framing and presentation. And then of course there are so many of them. They get seen by so many people in so many different places. So many judgments, so much exposure.

So when he finished the Venice series in 1995 and told me that he couldn’t face doing more I wasn’t exactly happy but I could sympathise. But then there was that promise he had made to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to make 3 editions for them and he couldn’t renege on that. It’s difficult to say “no” to a major museum. And I was thinking that if he could make editions for them, why couldn’t he make some more for me? A litde bit of emotional blackmail and the

promise of an exhibition did the trick. And he must have cursed me often as he travelled back and forth to Jack Shirreff’s printmaking studio in Wiltshire, especially on those occasions when he made the journey but could not find the inspiration, could not get into the right frame of mind, and had to take the train back to London empty-handed and disconsolate. But then on other days it worked, in fact to such an extent, that eventually one exhibition became two consecutive exhibitions, the first of a series of small hand-painted etchings and the second of his Into the Woods cycle

Ok, that was it. Definitely no more prints. Get back to the studio, hide away and make paintings as and when he wanted — except that the Elton John Aids Foundation were asking for an edition in order to raise funds. How can one turn that down? How can one say “no” to Elton John? How can one say “no” to a charity when millions of people are suffering, and dying, from that hideous disease. One can’t. So back down to Wiltshire — more scratching around on plates, more hand-painting, more signing and numbering but at least it made a lot of money for a very good cause at the end of it.

Then I rang Howard again. By this time it was ten years since he had done the L prints, his “last” prints, and I put it to him that as Jack Shireff was intending to retire, it would seem a pity not to do a print that celebrated their relationship over the previous fifteen years. This could be Howard’s and Jack’s swansong. Go out on a triumphant note. And of course I would give him an exhibition even if there was only one brand new element in it. So he made For Jack and could feel that he had done a good turn to his longest-standing collaborator and could return to the peace of his own studio having more than paid his dues.

And then I rang him again. Could I just pop round to see him and to look at the recent paintings? And during our conversation I did timorously raise the dreaded topic of

prints. He looked at me and said absolutely nothing. He closed his eyes for really quite a long time. I knew he wouldn’t shout at me because he doesn’t shout. But I find silence more unnerving than noise and so, to break the silence, I blurted out some fatuous comment about making a twenty-foot etching and then there was another silence and then finally, thank God, he opened his eyes and said “OK”. In the end he actually made two prints rather than one or at least two versions of the same absolutely gigantic print called As Time Goes By and we made another exhibition of the two largest etchings that any one had ever made, and when he was later asked by an interviewer why he had made such enormous prints, he replied “to show that I could”, and I kind of liked that answer.

All of which brings me to the contents of this catalogue… Well, we had done an 80” birthday celebratory exhibition for Giflian Ayres and Howard noticed that and he thought that it would be nice if he could have an 80” birthday exhibition too and pointed out that his 80t1 was due in August 2012. And of course I replied that I would be more than happy to give him such an exhibition and that in fact I would even be prepared to give him both of our galleries but that there was the small matter of having some new material to show..

Happy birthday Howard, may there be many more of them.

Alan Cristea, 2012

 

Artist quotes

I am isolated as artist, not as a person.

A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object.

Collecting has been my grent extravagance It’s a way of being. 1 collect for the same reason that I eat too much- I’m one of nature’s Shoppers.

I am happy for  people to talk about my pictures, but I wish devoutly that I was not expected to talk about them myself.

I don’t look at the work of my contemporaties very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It’s much easier to get near their paintings.

I fell through a crack for years. Historically, I am a nothing because I fit in no category.I can only be me.

I don’t really have a historical overview of my work at all. I’m not an art historian. I don’t see that there’s this period and that period.

I don’t think you can lightly paint a picture. It’s an activity I take very seriously.

I once was interviewed and got so exasperated that I said, `What do you want, a shopping list?’ They kept asking, `What’s in this picture?

I want my pictures to be things. I want them to be made up of marks that are physically and individually self-sufficient.

I think that words are often extraneous to what I do.

My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldn’t be able to say anything.

When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else.

You keep on balancing and balancingand balancing until the picture wins, because then the subject’s turned into the picture.

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