Writing

Held in the same private collection for over two decades, Writing (1991-1993) is an incandescent large-scale painting by Howard Hodgkin. The support is wood panel, with a broad, painted frame which forms an integral part of the work. A shoal of bright blue brushstrokes shimmers across the surface, laid over flashing depths of orange, yellow and green. More blue gathers in a lush sweep in the upper reaches, marbled like a turbulent sky. The title Writing holds no apparent connection to the work’s appearance. As Andrew Graham-Dixon has observed, however, Hodgkin’s paintings very often make the viewer into ‘a reader, an interpreter, an annotator of the arcane text that is the image’ (A. Graham-Dixon, Howard Hodgkin, London 1994, p. 146). Writing exemplifies the unique, enigmatic beauty of his visual language, which uses abstract colour and form to evoke personal memories and emotions. It was included in Hodgkin’s major retrospective exhibition of 1995-1996, which toured the Metropolitan Museum, New York, the Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth, Texas and the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

‘I am a representational painter, but not a painter of appearances’, Hodgkin once explained. ‘I paint representational pictures of emotional states’ (H. Hodgkin, quoted in E. Juncosa (ed.), Writers on Howard Hodgkin, London 2006, p. 104). His works are intimate, autobiographical and evocative of places and people, while bearing little pictorial relation to the visible world. Typically painted on wooden supports and incorporating painted frames or borders, they are theatres of memory, often suggesting views through or into interior spaces. Hodgkin arrived at his mature idiom in the 1970s, following early pictures that bore the influence of Pop and Abstract Expressionism. Across the years his works would be informed by his friendships, romances, conversations and travels. While Hodgkin remained a deeply private individual, his paintings’ surfaces, atmospheres and chromatic temperatures trace a life of emotional and sensory richness.

Hodgkin spoke of his use of wooden supports and frames in emotive terms. They helped to turn the paintings into objects, protecting something precious and hard-won. He also employed them for technical reasons, favouring wood over the temperamental flex of canvas. ‘It is the firmness of surface—the feeling that anything is possible, from a mark like a caress to one more like a punch on the jaw, that is the ultimate attraction’, he wrote in 1995 (H. Hodgkin to J. Elderfield, 13 March 1995, in Howard Hodgkin: Paintings, exh. cat. Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth, Forth Worth 1995, p. 79). Writing, with its diversity of bold and evanescent brushwork, sees Hodgkin’s mastery of his medium at full flight. Its expressive surface and scale are typical of his later work, which had reached new heights of eloquence and assurance by the 1990s.

Every one of Hodgkin’s paintings seeks to reincarnate an aspect of his past experience. At the same time, their vocabulary of blurs, dapples and smears depicts the ultimate impossibility of fixing or retrieving a memory. No less than writing, painting can only ever hope to be a partial mirror of the real world: a single, static image can never fully communicate the significance of a moment lost to time. As in the present work, Hodgkin’s marks often accumulate into a screen which appears to hover before another image, registering as a layer of interference. Palimpsests of underpainting—visible here in blazing, fiery hues—illuminate the surface, but also allude to a pile-up of previous pictures, overlaid like multiple exposures. As Hodgkin reaches into his past, Writing takes on its own physical history, becoming a rich new text in its own right.