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Lot Essay
The title of the present work On the Edge of the Indian Ocean, is not simply an oblique reference to Hodgkin's travels to India, nor a pictorial representation of one particular place. It is more an evocation of feeling, in which the artist frees himself from the constraints of pictorial representation and celebrates by the use of colour the exoticism and vividness of the Indian Ocean.
'The frequent references to travel in Hodgkin's art, the countless allusions to places that are foreign, alien or unfamiliar, record the painters movements, but only imprecisely, and they do not do only that. They amount to a statement of amibition for the paintings themselves. They say that to look at a picture should itself be to travel, to be transported, to be taken somewhere else. Every painting is its own self-sufficient world to be experienced as we would experience a foreign place travelled to for the first time: radiant, uncanny alien... This may partly explain Hodgkin's preference for colours that are clear and fresh and unclouded, colours as seen by someone who approaches the world with the attitutde of the one travelling, who sees it unveiled and undimmed.' (A. Graham-Dixon, Howard Hodgkin, London 1994, pp. 103-104).
'The frequent references to travel in Hodgkin's art, the countless allusions to places that are foreign, alien or unfamiliar, record the painters movements, but only imprecisely, and they do not do only that. They amount to a statement of amibition for the paintings themselves. They say that to look at a picture should itself be to travel, to be transported, to be taken somewhere else. Every painting is its own self-sufficient world to be experienced as we would experience a foreign place travelled to for the first time: radiant, uncanny alien... This may partly explain Hodgkin's preference for colours that are clear and fresh and unclouded, colours as seen by someone who approaches the world with the attitutde of the one travelling, who sees it unveiled and undimmed.' (A. Graham-Dixon, Howard Hodgkin, London 1994, pp. 103-104).