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
painting endangered-species painter
To be a painter now is to be part of a very small, endangered species.
eye long gleam
It takes a long time for the gleam in the eye to turn into something solid.
thinking
I think that words are often extraneous to what I do.
teamwork self want
I want my pictures to be things. I want them to be made up of marks that are physically and individually self-sufficient.
thinking paint activity
I dont think you can lightly paint a picture. Its an activity I take very seriously.
too-much way extravagance
Collecting has been my great extravagance. It's a way of being. I collect for the same reason that I eat too much-I'm one of nature's shoppers.
lying passion next
Passion lies between one mark and the next, and also within all of them.
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.
thinking courageous
I never think that anything I do is courageous.
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.
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.
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.
worry england looks
In England, it's thought to be morally suspect to worry about what your surroundings look like.
winning subjects
You keep on balancing and balancing and balancing until the picture wins, because then the subject's turned into the picture.