Howard Hodgkin's work is renowned for exuberant colour, but he finds the process of painting less than joyful, he tells Aidan Dunne
The Howard Hodgkin retrospective at Imma is a treat for the eyes. Hodgkin, now approaching his mid-70s, has long been well known - some might say notorious - for his use of luscious colour in vibrant, boldly patterned paintings. To make your way through the show at Imma is to be constantly arrested by images that startle by virtue of their audacious swathes of colour, sometimes in giddy, dizzying chromatic collisions - scarlet-yellow-green - and sometimes in relative isolation, as when an unexpected burst of pink or yellow ignites in the centre of a framework of sober grey.
It's all the more striking because Hodgkin requested that the galleries be painted, which they are, to provide a coloured backdrop to the work: a pale, cold green and a rich gold ochre. The effect is dramatic and gives the show an atmospheric distinction right away. It's something he did first, and very controversially, at the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1984. At the time it was unheard of. Paintings were hung in white rooms and that was that.
"There was a lot of argument about it," he recalls now. "I was told that people would remember the walls but not the paintings." There were no arguments this time around. His rationale for a coloured background is very simple: "Put a painting in a white room and the wall reflects more light than the painting." Tone down the walls, he believes, and it's far easier to see the painting for itself.
The retrospective, a co-operative Hiberno-Iberian-English undertaking, originally mooted and co-curated by Imma director Enrique Juncosa, has been a long time in gestation. Many of Hodgkin's best paintings had to be borrowed from far afield, including on the other side of the Atlantic. To see them all gathered together, in one place, is truly exceptional. Later in the year, in June, the show will travel on to Tate Britain in London (it's worth pointing out that entrance to Imma's exhibitions is free).
Hodgkin himself is aware of the considerable logistics involved, though more as someone it's happening to than as someone who's doing it, so to speak. After vainly trying to come up with a few relevant dates and statistics he gives up, smiles and says: "Clearly no factual information should be accepted from me."
THERE HAVE BEEN several retrospectives throughout his formidable tally of exhibitions to date, so another is hardly traumatic or, as artists dread, conclusive. But he suggests that we get away from the show itself to talk about it. Having spent a lot of time laying out the work, "I've looked at it so much at this stage that I have to get away."
Does he feel remote from work he made several decades ago? "I do feel quite disconnected from it. But I don't dislike it. That doesn't happen much, that I reject earlier work, because the process of rejection would have happened in the way I work. But, I think naturally, I'm always far more interested in what I'm doing now."
He famously paints on wooden panels. Not pristine, custom made wood panels but recycled pieces of wood: old picture frames, table tops, bits of plywood, chopping boards, wooden trays, doors. Once his predilection became known, friends started providing things for him to paint on. He evidently likes surfaces with a history, scarred and even misshapen by use. He likes their irregularities but isn't fetishistic about them. That is, the work isn't about the knots and textures of the wood which is, in the end, just a support for the painting.
Starting with a scarred, compromised object is one way of overcoming the fear of the blank canvas. But he also likes the "resistance" of the wood, by which he means, paradoxically, that "it doesn't answer back". It just absorbs the marks made without rejoinder. Canvas, on the other hand, he feels, has a deconsecrating give to it and: "It is moody, it's affected by dampness, for example, and you have to keep adjusting it. It loosens and goes slack. That doesn't suit me partly because I think of my pictures as things."
HIS STUDIO IS a light-filled oasis located behind a packed streetscape close to the British Museum in Bloomsbury, London. Here he works on his paintings over prolonged periods of time. An essay written about him pointed out "something that I'd forgotten". He'd forgotten that it took him almost nine years to bring one particular painting, ironically titled Snapshot, to completion. That doesn't mean he worked at it every day. He comes back to things periodically. Most of the works in progress in his studio are covered in fabric sheets. He'll work on a piece, let it dry, then cover it for a while. "The trick is to surprise oneself."
Familiarity, he says, can blind you to what is wrong with a painting. See it anew and with luck it snaps into focus, you know what needs to be done. Eventually, again with luck, it will be resolved. "I'm usually fairly sure when it is, though I find with age that I have to talk myself into it more, perhaps because I get less trusting of the results as I get older."
It's commonly thought that painting is an enjoyable activity. A licensed playing with colour. Hodgkin, as with most other painters, demurs. "Painting as an occupation isn't something I enjoy very much. It's all right sometimes when you've finished something and you feel a momentary satisfaction. I'm really not being pompous when I say that I think only amateur artists really enjoy the activity of painting. I know when you look at work by 18th- and 19th-century amateurs, there is this real feeling that they enjoyed themselves because, I think, by comparison what they are doing is fairly purposeless."
Does the lack of enjoyment derive from the fact that a painting in progress is a sequence of problems to be solved, something he is stuck with? "Stuck is exactly right," he acknowledges. "You are stuck with it." Rather than painting because he enjoys it, he paints because he is fascinated by it, fascinated by trying to make paintings, by trying to get them right. By comparison, an amateur artist is working towards a predetermined end. When Hodgkin makes the first mark, he has no idea at all what he is aiming for. It's a process of discovery. What he does have is a subject that he aims to convey in paint.
Casual observers might regard his paintings as abstract, their marks arbitrary. Occasionally one can make out a representational detail, but more often than not the picture is put together in terms of an arrangement of blocks of colour, line and pattern - a lot of pattern, by virtue of his liking for repeated, sponge-like blobs. But no matter how abstract the pictures may seem, they are firmly anchored to events. Hodgkin is and has consistently been clear on this point: "My paintings come from very strong feelings about their subjects." Each painting addresses a specific subject: "The titles tell you what the pictures are about." Some of these subjects - such as dinner parties, or stays in nice hotels, or visits to museums - have attracted the scorn of critics who denigrate his work as overly precious and narrow in its concerns, confined to a privileged milieu and appealing to a privileged audience.
TO A LIMITED extent all of that is true. Actually the evidence suggests that his work appeals to quite a wide and varied audience. He is adamant that he doesn't paint with any audience in mind other than himself. For a painter, he argues, unlike a writer, the sense of an audience is necessarily diffuse and vague. Though, he notes, when he remarked to Susan Sontag once - "heart in mouth" - that she was lucky, as a writer, that she addressed the widest potential audience because "everyone can read" she instantly and forcefully retorted that they couldn't. In addition, he points out, "historically, painters have gone from being commissioned, being told what to do, to deciding for themselves what they are going to do." He is unabashed about the specifics of his subject matter which is, after all and not unreasonably, his own experience.
Part of the adverse view of his work undoubtedly relates to its emphasis on ocular pleasure. Beauty is out of fashion in art, and bright colours have traditionally been distrusted in English painting, for example.
"Perhaps colour is too close to bodily functions, to sensuality. Tumescent sunsets, perhaps," he says with a wry smile. "People react against that, they can feel it's too naked." Not that he sets out to make colourful paintings. "Colour is what paintings are made of, but I'd never decide that I should make a painting with lots of any particular colour, never. Colour is functional, it's to do with the way the picture works, to how appropriate it is to the subject."
His paintings range from very small to very large but the scale is, he says, no indicator of how much time and effort goes into a particular piece. "A tiny painting can absorb a huge amount of energy." The decisive factor is the subject. "Some demand big painting, some small. Years ago, I said stupidly in answer to a question about size that bigger paintings are good because you can put more into them. That's a terrible oversimplification. It's to do with an appropriate sense of scale, I think."
HE IS ALSO a prolific printmaker. It's something entirely different from paintings for him, involving a different way of thinking. Yet he has managed to rethink his working method with extraordinary success, to produce a body of work that is outstanding in its own right. (Liesbeth Heenk's beautiful catalogue raisonné of his prints, a hefty volume, has just been published in paperback by Thames & Hudson). "You have to be swift and decisive when you're working on a print," he explains. The process lacks the luxury of time, but there are compensations. One of those is working with other people.
Most artists spend a great deal of time alone, working in relative isolation, and he is no exception. "It is a very lonely business, and I hate that. Perhaps that's one of the reasons why I don't enjoy painting. Temperamentally I like company, I like conversation and being with other people." Which is partly why he has situated himself in a densely populated part of London. "I like hearing the groups of tourists going past the window. I enjoy going over to the British Museum. I mean the objects there interest me, of course, but the people, the visitors interest me even more."
Howard Hodgkin is at Imma until May 7, 01-6129900. www.modernart.ie. Writers on Howard Hodgkin (21.95), edited by Enrique Juncosa and published to coincide with the exhibition, has contributions from many writers including Colm Tóibín, Bruce Chatwin, Susan Sontag, Anthony Lane and Alan Hollinghurst