| Howard Hodgkin Prints - An essay by David Acton
Continued (2)
During the 1970s, Hodgkin continued to refine drawing
and synopsize represented space in his work, as his
style gradually became more painterly. Enchanted
by the materiality of paint, he used pigment in such
a way as to reveal its physical qualities and behaviour.
The artist worked in layers, and his pictures offer
a tactile history of their own making. Hodgkin
derived his gestural manner from the Nabis rather than
the Abstract Expressionists, seeking a poetic manner
instead of self-revelation. Gradually he came
to depend less upon linear drawing, and developed a
repertory of marks, arranging dots and splotches of
paint across the panels, along with bars, commas, and
discs in superimposed grids. The artist preferred
impersonal spots that anyone could make in the simplest,
repeatable way. However, his seemingly casual
application of these humble daubs belies the meticulous
placement of each brush mark.
In 1973 the printer Maurice Payne introduced Hodgkin
to the techniques of intaglio printmaking at Petersburg
Studios in London. In wonderfully delicate prints
like Interior (Day) and Interior (Night)
(Heenk 23, 24) the artist learned how the soft translucency
of aquatint could parallel his extended alkyd washes,
and how layers of printed ink can create effects as
diaphanous and enigmatic as overpainting. However
this was a difficult period for the artist, when illness,
introspection, and family upheaval preoccupied him,
a time when he felt most comfortable at his easel.
In 1976, soon after the first solo exhibition of Hodgkin’s
prints at the Tate Gallery, he emerged with renewed
self-confidence, and achieved a breakthrough.
While working with the printer Ian Lawson at Aymestrey
Water Mill in Herefordshire, the artist laid green gouache
onto a working proof of his colour lithograph Julian
and Alexis (Heenk 31). Rather than prepare
a fifth lithographic plate for these passages, Hodgkin
decided to hand colour the whole small edition, with
the help of his son Sam. The thick pigment provided
a satisfying tactile variation from the flat sheen of
lithography.
Hodgkin took fresh determination when he later returned
to Payne’s intaglio shop. Over weeks of
dialogue and debate, he communicated his desire for
more direct methods of working intaglio plates.
Payne introduced him to the technique of softground
etching, which can capture the energy and intimation
of a drawn line, and to liftground aquatint in which
the artist draws the plate in the same orientation as
the finished print. Hodgkin also succeeded in
decelerating the workshop schedule, enabling him to
work in his accustomed careful, contemplative pace.
It took about a month of intense effort to create the
etching and aquatint Nick (Cat.no.2, Heenk
32). With time to experiment Hodgkin discovered
ways of working impossible in painting, like tearing
a proof in half to isolate and reconsider specific areas
of the composition. He made significant
changes along the way, cutting down one plate and adding
another. He experimented with different modes
of touching proofs in different hues, and initiated
Payne in his preferred manner of applying hand colouring,
so that the printer, not the artist, would touch the
prints with gouache.
Nick stands out in Hodgkin’s printed
oeuvre for the clarity of its anecdotal representation.
The artist cannily used geometry and pattern in this
print to create illusionistic space, and then to deny
it. Within his customary framing motif is the
rectangular space picture window, defined by the horizontal
slats of louvered shutters. Thus, the blue border
depicts an exterior wall, softly illuminated by moonlight,
and dappled by the shadows of leafy trees invisible
above the viewer. On the left side of the window
open shutters reveal interior space. The central
vertical bands, dividing the composition, are green
curtains, brighter where the fabric is open to the viewer,
and darker where it is blocked by blinds. Through
the parted slats on the right we have a glimpse into
the room, and the clear outline of a lamp. Here
too is a bending figure, whose nudity is emphasized
by bright yellow. Another rectangle of green seems
to be a towel, suggesting that Nick has just emerged
from the bath. Our voyeuristic glimpse from the
night into his room gives the image a frisson of eroticism.
Later in 1977 Hodgkin was in New York where he worked
at the Petersburg Studios with Bruce Porter on lithographs
that finally enabled him to grasp the medium’s
capabilities. Porter’s background as a painter,
and his encouragement of play, provoked a freedom and
freshness in the prints. In New York, Hodgkin
saw a picture by the American Regionalist painter Thomas
Hart Benton, who knew first hand the fury of tornadoes
on the plains of Kansas. In A Storm (Cat.no.5,
Heenk 36) Hodgkin tried to capture the thrill and terror
of a threatening storm. First he prepared the
paper with a wash of green gouache, then he built up
layers of lithography from three plates printed in succession
in green and blue-black. The print’s extraordinary
delicacy comes from layered washes of tusche—greasy
liquid ink for drawing the lithographic image—mixed
in varied dilutions. Thinned with different solvents,
these washes created heterogeneous effects as they were
applied to the plates and as they dried, leaving microscopic
tide marks and patterns that the printers call peau
de crapeau, or toad skin.
The artist also used strata of imagery to evoke mysterious
nocturnal light in his tour de force For Bernard
Jacobson (Cat.no.6, Heenk 38). This print
grew out of his illustrations for a new edition of E.
M. Forster’s A Passage to India.
Hodgkin had always seen the graphic arts as a fitting
complement to literature, an important part of his life.
Literary images became the enlivening spark for his
many of his prints beginning in the late 1970s.[2]
Though the Forster project failed to materialize, one
of Hodgkin’s visions from the book became For
Bernard Jacobson, a lithograph titled as a rueful
gesture after a disagreement with the print publisher.
The artist derived its astonishing dark palette and
high-keyed accents from Rajput miniature painting.
He also looked to Indian painting for the flattened
perspective and setting, which has been described as
the view into a garden at night from the height of an
elevated balcony.[3]
Hodgkin’s dark frame now suggests a terrace or
the walls bounding a closed garden. Spots of different
sizes resemble leafy bushes and their moon shadows,
cast on the wall and each other. Overlapping splotches
in different sizes and colours also suggest quiet movement. This sense is emphasized by the mirrored motifs of two
banana palms, leaning into the composition from either
side, at angles that imply a gentle sway.
Hodgkin achieved the delicate tonality of this print,
and its impression of space, by unconventional technical
means. Because the black paper on which he planned
to print the nocturne was not available, the artist
stained large sheets of white paper with dark purple
dye. The varied infusions of colorant required
to tint enough paper for an entire edition, and irregularities
in the paper’s sizing, created a range of hue
and mottled tone. After four superimposed lithographic
runs from as many plates, there were three hand colouring
operations in For Bernard Jacobson. Black
wash was painted around the border, and light blue gouache
was painted through stencils, in the areas of the palm
leaves where yellow crayon was scribbled.
Notes
- 2 Hodgkin created prints to illustrate the deluxe
folios of Susan Sontag’s The Way We live
Now (London, Karsten Schubert, 1991; see Heenk
pp.216-17), and Julian Barnes’s Evermore (London, Palawan Press, 1996; see Heenk pp.218-19).
Among the other works of literature that may have
inspired Hodgkin’s prints are Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags (Heenk 90), Thomas Mann’s
novel Death in Venice (Heenk 93-96), the
poem Tears, Idle Tears (Heenk 107) by Alfred
Lord Tennyson, and Somerset Maugham’s novel Strictly Personal (Heenk109). Hodgkin
may have been Inspired by Stephen Sondheim’s
musical Into the Woods (Heenk 113-16) when
he executed a suite of four large gestural prints.
- 3 See Liesbeth Heenk, see Howard Hodgkin Prints:
A Catalogue Raisonné, with an introduction
by Nan Rosenthal, London, Thames & Hudson, 2003,
p.77.
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