LH  Do you make an image more personal or less personal if you know that it is being produced in large numbers?

HH  Of course it’s less personal. I always think of my prints as being totally different from my paintings. My prints are more like posters that you just hang on the wall as a thing.

LH  Does it interest you where your prints end up?

HH  Not particularly. Not even if they end up in museums. Fashion rules in museums, particularly at the moment. Before I became a trustee of the Tate Gallery in 1970, I vaguely realized that curators judge work on whether it is part of history and whether it is any good. Nowadays curators only ask themselves whether the work is part of history.

I have been discovered in my career so many times that I’ve already had nine lives. I am delighted if a museum gives me an exhibition because exhibitions matter. Being bought matters less. On the other hand, at least people hang them up in their houses. In museums, most prints are not on view. The British Museum has the study for one of my best prints, Moonlight [1980], but they never display it.

LH  Is there a printmaker you feel particularly close to? Do you follow exhibitions of any contemporary printmakers?

HH  I wish I did feel close to Nabi printmakers, but I don’t. I look at very few exhibitions.

LH  Does the technique of painting or printmaking allow you to express something which the other technique cannot?

HH  I certainly could never make a print that was like one of my paintings. In the beginning I was upset when publishers wanted me to make prints that were like my pictures.

My prints are the result of thinking about what prints can be. The last thing I want them to be is substitute paintings.

LH  To some extent your paintings and prints have become more alike in the last few years.

HH  I am sorry to hear that. I was actually hoping that they had become more different. In that case, I should stop making prints. There should be one sort of expression for prints and another one for painting.

When I recently showed Into the Woods, Winter to someone he said, ‘That is not a print, but a painting.’ In some respects that is a valid criticism, because of its scale and the way it is made. It isn’t really a multiple image but rather a single image.

Prints such as ‘Into the Woods’ and ‘Venetian Views’ are becoming single images. Part of the reason that they work as prints is because they are actually on the edge of not being prints. That makes them much more risky than little prints. Real prints should perhaps be more multiple and less unique in spirit. Obviously you can say more with a painting than you can with a print. Prints are not nearly as complex as paintings.

LH  In the series of ‘Venetian Views’ [1995] you have shown that your prints can be very complex.

HH  I want them to be as simple as possible, or as straight-forward as woodcuts, images d’epinal, like Napoleon on his charger wearing a big black hat. One of the advantages of printmaking is that it forces you to do things like ‘the cat sat on the mat’. Prints are an invitation to banality. Sometimes they are a relief from the complexities of painting.

LH  An important contribution you made to the history of printmaking was using an assistant to hand colour your prints at any stage of the printing process. Could you tell me how you got the idea of hand colouring, and how you got the idea of using an assistant?

HH  I find it hard to remember. I coloured a whole edition of Julian and Alexis in 1977 with the help of my son Sam, but I’m not sure why.

I do remember what happened when I was working with Maurice Payne in 1977 on Nick. I had trouble with it; I changed the shape of the plate, and added another plate. In the end there was nothing more that could be done, except hand colouring it. It has very little hand colouring, but it totally changed the image.The person who really encouraged me was the printmaker Bruce Porter at Petersburg Press in New York. He had a very alert sensibility to what the artist wanted to do. I had never come across anybody like that before. For example, Jarid’s Porch [1977] was coloured in such a way that its central shape was made of crinkled paper. Bruce made the paper surface expand, by painting it with watercolour, something nobody else would have done. One of the things that was so difficult was that there were so many idées fixes about what you could and could not do. That has long since gone.

I got seriously involved in hand colouring with Cinda Sparling at Solo Press in New York. That is when I learnt how to control it. We coloured prints half way through the printing process and then printed on top of the hand colouring, which was exciting.

The important thing about hand colouring is to get other people to do it. In the beginning I would do it partly myself, and then they would copy me. But with Cinda it was like having another instrument.

LH  She told me how you instructed her using metaphors such as to paint ‘like a silk stocking’.

HH  Yes, she probably remembers the metaphors better than I do. She was horrified when I once said, ‘That’s easy, Cinda, it’s just like hitting a baby’, which is an old English expression. She had incredible control.

The wonderful thing about hand colouring is that it is so immediate. That is partly why I did it and why I have used it increasingly. I hate the printing process, where you make an image and you have to wait, sometimes for weeks, before you can see what you have done. And then it is back to front anyway. Hand colouring is also so quick – as it is for the printer as well. The other great thing about hand colouring is that you can correct what you have printed, instantly and radically.

I never hand colour the editions of my prints, although I have sometimes hand coloured the first one, to show the printer what to do. It can look difficult to do, and this is a way of explaining. Occasionally I hand colour single prints.