In the Studio

Howard Hodgkin often works on his paintings over a long period of time, sometimes even years. While he always has several paintings in hand, Hodgkin only keeps the one that he is currently working on visible in the studio. Beginning a work is always difficult for him:

I go for a walk. Maybe I go to the British Museum and look at something. I try to forget about as much as possible until I start thinking about what scale the picture will be…and then I think, ‘Is this going to be a little picture or a big picture?...I think more and more about the painting, then I make a mark and anther, and then the trouble starts.

Hodgkin's Studio:

His studio space is bright and spacious with natural light that comes through windows overhead. The walls are lined with large stretched canvases that act as screens behind which hang paintings at varying degrees of completion so that Hodgkin cannot see them. As the artist explains, ‘I can’t work on a picture when I can see another one in the room. I have to hide it.’ Although Hodgkin often exhibits his work against coloured walls (as with his retrospective at Tate Britain), his studio is entirely white.

His studio also provides evidence of his need for order in his painting process. Tubes of paint seemingly in a random heap on a table, on closer inspection, are lined up in order of hue, like a rainbow. Another table supports a mass of paint brushes, cleaned but revealing his choice of pure colour through the staining of bristles. Recently cleaned brushes are placed, in a line, on tissue on the floor for drying. In contrast to his brushes seen in early studio photographs, these are broader, reflecting the growing scale of his paintings. The top of a small Georgian-style table is used as a palette, repeatedly wiped, it has developed a noticeable green sheen.

When asked to describe his process, Hodgkin states:

I start out with the subject and naturally I have to remember first of all what it looked like, but it would also perhaps contain a great deal of feeling and sentiment. All of that has got to be somehow transmuted, transformed or made into a physical object, and when that happens, when that’s finally been done, when the last physical marks have been put on and the subject comes back – which, after all, is usually the moment when the painting is at long last a coherent physical object – well, then the picture’s finished and there is no question of doing anything more to it. My pictures really finish themselves.