Howard Hodgkin
Howard Hodgkin
Sir Gordon Howard Eliot Hodgkin CH CBE is a British painter and printmaker. His work is most often associated with abstraction...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth6 August 1932
artist persons isolated
I am isolated as an artist, not as a person.
back-when painting made
A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object.
identity facts monsters
Eventually, a collection ceases to be a personal indulgence and assumes its own identity. In fact, it becomes a thing in its own right - rather like Frankenstein's monster.
winning subjects
You keep on balancing and balancing and balancing until the picture wins, because then the subject's turned into the picture.
artist criticism way
I'm vulnerable to criticism. Any artist is, because you work alone in your studio and, until recently, critics were the only way you'd get any feedback.
technique surface century
The picture surface recedes just as much in the 20th century as it did in the 15th. The techniques of making pictures have hardly changed.
artist looks painting
I don't look at the work of my contemporaries very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It's much easier to get near their paintings.
gallery soothing copies
I find old copies of National Gallery catalogues, which are written in the dryest possible prose, infinitely soothing.
eye long gleam
It takes a long time for the gleam in the eye to turn into something solid.
painting endangered-species painter
To be a painter now is to be part of a very small, endangered species.
finishing
My pictures really finish themselves.
way impossible painting
It is simply impossible to control a large painting with the edge in the same way that you can control a small one.
looks painting surprising
When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else.
artist portraits envious
I'm very envious of the few artists who are any good and still do portraits.