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Howard Hodgkin is by temperament a painter. An account of his unusual achievement as a printmaker needs to begin with a description of his painting, including the environment in which it continues to develop. His London studio, a large, skylit, brick-walled space, is painted refrigerator white. At any given time a number of paintings in progress lean against the walls. These oil on wood objects, which Hodgkin may work on over a period of years, are shielded from view by easily moveable rectangles of white fabric on stretcher bars. Only the particular panel on which he is working at a given time is visible as he paints. The white expanse provides an immaculate foil for the brilliantly saturated hues Hodgkin usually employs. The manner is what used to be called painterly, but the colours are distinct from one another. Sometimes velvety blacks, richly modulated greys or unexpected pastel tones set off the strong hues and intensify them.

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Hodgkin’s manner of painting, to proceed slowly to find an image while alone in a clean white studio, is in some respects quite incompatible with the actualities and economics of contemporary printmaking. Printmaking is a mediated medium, somewhat analogous to filmmaking. The artist goes out of his studio, often to another city, to work at an expensive specialized shop with other people. Their craft and knowledge of techniques, such as how to etch, ink and wipe a plate from which to print the image in an edition, is crucial to the outcome. Hodgkin recalls that early in his career as a printmaker, after he had produced some screenprints but before he had worked with techniques that are less immediately reproductive, the print publisher Paul Cornwall-Jones, whom he has described as ‘an amazing teacher’, told him the following, ‘You don’t quite understand, prints are made for people who already have an image, not for people who are searching for one. If you know what you are going to do, you’ll make a print. If you don’t know what you are going to do, you’ll make a mess.’2 This sergeant-majorly advice encouraged Hodgkin to begin to conceptualize images in advance, an approach that goes somewhat against the grain of his method of painting slowly, although spontaneously, in layers. As he gradually acquired knowledge of what printmaking methods were particularly compatible with the directness of his painting, for example, soft-ground etching or a tonal technique such as aquatint, it became easier to think in advance about an image without sacrificing a direct way of working. Today he may keep ten future prints in his head.

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Hodgkin’s method of painting so that successive layers of paint deposits are left conspicuous (whether to serve an illusion of depth, or to function as a metaphor for the personal memories that inform the paintings, or to make the surface vivid) seems in one sense utterly compatible with the nature of intaglio and planographic printing. The etchings and lithographs that dominate his prints of the last twenty-five years are – like most prints – produced in successive layers. Printing plates inked with different colours and different parts of the imagery deposit ink in careful registration on the same sheet of paper. In this respect, thinking in layers, Hodgkin has for a long time thought like a printmaker. Given his approach to painting, layers come naturally to him.

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The hand colouring in Hodgkin’s prints varies from edition to edition. Sometimes it is used as a bottom layer, primarily to colour the paper. Sometimes it is sandwiched between different printed runs through the press. At other times it is applied after the print run is complete. Several of these methods may appear in one print. It has brought to many of the prints the alla prima quality and vividness of surface found in his paintings.
As early as 1971, when Hodgkin made the ‘Indian Views’ (pages 10 and 11), a series of twelve screenprints of his recollections of exterior scenes of India as glimpsed through the small windows of a moving train, the frames that form part of the compositions of his paintings appear in depicted, although abstract, form as wide borders in the prints. In the ‘Indian Views’ these frame-like borders originated, at least conceptually, as the perimeters of actual windows or at any rate as a marker between the position of the artist-viewer inside the train and what he saw through the window. In the intaglios and lithographs of the late 1970s and early to middle 1980s the emphatic frame-like elements, sometimes created by hand colouring, frequently help to establish a window-like view into interior scenes. It is interesting that often these painted or printed ‘frames’ do not extend to the edges of the printed sheets but are set some distance inside the periphery. The engraving line that forms a natural inkless border around most intaglio prints, made by the imprint of the metal plate on the dampened paper as it goes through the press, has no place in Hodgkin’s work. In all of his intaglio prints the size of the plates is at least slightly larger than the size of the papers – or the papers were torn down after printing – with the result that no engraving line is created. For Hodgkin the appearance of such a traditional border would evoke the fussier aspects of printmaking, which he strives to avoid. It would also introduce a mechanical frame into an image conceived as having an imaginary frame of the artist’s own making. Here Hodgkin seems intent on removing a possible contradiction.
In many of the intaglio prints of the 1990s, the wide vertical and horizontal frame-like elements are still a strong part of the composition. Yet for several reasons – such as the thickness of hand-made papers used, the superimposition of large swaths of colour going in diagonal directions over parts of the frame-like elements, and the use of carborundum paste on the etching plates, which creates embossed areas on the paper – in a number of the more recent prints the function of the depicted frames as illusionistic devices seems to give way to the material and abstract qualities of the prints.

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Over the past two decades Hodgkin has worked with the printmaker Jack Shirreff at the 107 Workshop in Wiltshire on prints that combine hand colouring with lift-ground aquatint and the relatively new medium of carborundum. Using a range of different grains of resin in the aquatint grounds, from fine to very coarse, has varied the texture of areas of his prints. The carborundum medium varies the texture even more emphatically. A thick paste made of this very hard substance is distributed on the plate by the artist, using a brush or his hands. It then dries. Shirreff has likened the plate at this point to a relief map of the Alps, with peaks, escarpments, valleys and plains. When the plate is inked and wiped, ink remains trapped in the escarpments and valleys but disappears from the peaks and the smooth plains. Dampened hand-made paper, thick enough to adapt to the hardness of the dried carborundum, is pressed on the plate and two things occur: the paper takes on the structure of the peaks and valleys – it becomes a reverse relief map of the mountains – and the paper picks up the ink still trapped in the escarpments and valleys.

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The powerful physicality in Hodgkin’s prints of the past twenty years parallels that in his paintings. It is not limited to large prints. Many quite small hand-coloured etchings with carborundum, for example, three works commissioned by the Mezzanine Gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, After Degas (1990–91; page 91), Snow (1995; page 23) and Summer (1997; page 6), as well as Norwich (1999–2000; page 25), made for the Elton John AIDS Foundation, have the immediacy, materiality, complexity and breadth of internal scale that is so telling in much larger prints.

Extracted from Howard Hodgkin: The Complete Prints published by Thames & Hudson at £29.95.'