Hodgkin

Howard Hodgkin is a British Painter and printmaker, his work is often associated with abstraction and has poetic connotations.

My first impressions of Hodkins is that he is a very poetic, eloquent and thoughtful artist  he appreciates that a message or memory doesn't necessarily have to be depicted in something you would call realistic or accurate but in a conceptual and perceptive manner. It's also quite a brave and courageous move to create work which is guaranteed to be lost on some people. I had to study his work to appreciate the greatness of it.                                       Although Hodgkin's started his career with hard-edged pieces on canvas and board, he now does more sweeping, spontaneous and multi-tonal/coloured forms, whilst still retaining the fundamental meaning behind his work, which is to try an convey a memory as suppose to something he saw, there is a slight difference. A famous quote by Hodgkin's,'When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as it does to everyone else' which shows just how spontaneous yet meaningful his work is.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The artwork reminds me of futurism, although I know the majority of his work isn't centered around motion. His work relates to abstraction, the idea that visual elements in a painting don't necessarily have to be achievable in real life. His work reminds me of Kandinski a little bit however his work is perhaps even harder to decipher, if it should be. I'd like to ask the artist if memories were the only inspiration for his pieces. Perhaps I'm sure how he'd derive such variation from simply memories, even if memories can be varied. Through his work, instead of aiming to create a memory, I want to buy a disposable camera,trace the fundamental shapes, and block it out in vivid colours, to capture the memory, whilst creating a painting in it's own right.



This was my own personal analysis of his work, made on Powerpoint.

 I feel the piece has very effective use of colour, it's very vivid and powerful. It's very pleasing to look at. I don't think the message  that Hodgkin is trying to convey is very clear, I can appreciate that his work is abstract but equally he says he is trying to create a painterly interpretation of what he saw and what events transpired that night, if the piece was not called 'Dinner at West Hill' I would have never been able to make any interpretations of food or location based on the forms in his painting. Hodgkin stated that this painting was the most 'complicated and delicately balanced painting' that he ever allowed himself, when explaining the meaning for the forms he stated,'most of the forms in the painting which are not part of my normal language derive of course from Bernard's pictures. In some cases these even overlap (his and my forms)' also 'the white line is the picture plane, the edge of the table, also it cuts the picture in two and shows therefore in two ways that everything is flat—the illusionism isn't a lie after all.’ These two statements from the creator of the painting himself proved particularly interesting to me as I managed to align and compare my personal analysis of his work with what he actually intended to create. I wanted to get an outside opinion so I asked my piers, one of them stated that, 'they don't feel anything towards or from this piece'

when asked why she said that it didn't display anything of any tenuous enough of a link to reality to be understood or felt.

The white line through the middle of the piece makes it very distinctive and easily remembered. 

 My response to Hodgkin based on my experience in Tooting Bec Common.