Howard Hodgkin - Time and Place
I decided to look at Howard Hodgkin because I thought his prints were relevant to the work I was doing. The book on him, 'Time and Place', says that 'we intuit the time of making individual marks, the moments of decision, the speed of execution… what we discern of its (the artwork's) evolution prompts thought about the dynamics of memory in retrieving experience'. I understood this as, we, the viewer, are able to make out the artists feelings in the painting/of the scene, by the colours, direction of brushstrokes, overlays of paint, and brush marks. Using these clues we may decide how fast the artist created the painting, which perhaps gives us an insight into their emotion at the time (impulsive? relaxed?). As explained in the book; 'complexity of the surface is a necessary condition for the representation of complex emotions'. For example my chalk pastel drawings were more impulsive, and you can tell because the marks made are fluid and continuous, whereas in the lino prints I did, the marks are rigid and restrained. It is up to the viewer what they then think of the atmosphere and emotion that lies within the landscape and the painting.
I was first drawn to look at Hodgkin because I thought his work was visually similar to mine, however after reading about his work I realised it was contextually similar as well. He uses texture to provoke deeper meaning to a scene he has painted, which compares to the way I have used texture to suggest how I feel about the familiar landscapes in my paintings. This may not be apparent to the viewer, however, the paintings are ambiguous and what the viewer might see could be different to what I see, therefore making the landscape personal to me, and also personal to them.
'The site itself had been transformed by encounters that were particular to the artist'; when you have a sense of a place that means something to you, you want to depict it in your artwork. In order for a viewer to gage what is going on, the artist must give a sympathetic response. This is why I chose to paint/print/draw the natural landscapes from memory, because I wasn't just copying what I saw, but trying to draw out some feeling that might be aroused by imagining the countryside scene in my head, thus being more sympathetic.
In the two top pieces bellow, Hodgkin uses the wood as part of his paintings, I think this is an interesting idea in relation to my work because I have been working printed textures of wood, so maybe next I will work over actual wood.

Bibliography

Hodgkin, H., Smiles, S. and Stanley, M. (2010). Howard Hodgkin. Oxford: Modern Art Oxford.

(Howard Hodgkin prints 1977 - 1983. (1985). London: Tate Gallery Publications.)