Pictures of the Month | Auagust 2010
Picture of the Month
August 2010
Artificial Flowers, (1975, on loan form private collection)
Howard Hodgkin (b. 1932)
Oil on wood
August's Picture of the Month has been chosen by David Hare, playwright and journalist.
‘W.H. Auden famously defined poetry as “memorable speech”, and you can argue, in the same way, that painting is “memorable imagery”. I like small paintings, and often the maquette of a sculpture is more powerful than the sculpture itself – because it’s more concentrated. Howard Hodgkin is at his most vivid, his most refined when he paints small, and the best thing about Artificial Flowers is that you can look at it for five minutes and then take it home with you. You can hang it in your mind, and you’ll always find it there.’
(David Hare)
Hodgkin, whose career now spans over fifty years, is widely recognised as one of Britain’s most original abstract artists. While deeply respectful of the conventions of traditional descriptive European and Oriental art, Hodgkin primarily aims to evoke specific emotionally charged experiences, using colour, shape and composition to communicate inner feelings: ‘I paint representational pictures of emotional situations.....the most complete expression of (such) a subject would not necessarily involve description’.
This painting’s title, ‘Artificial Flowers’, encourages us to look for a literal subject. We might discern ordered beds of flowers to the right of the composition, and an array of fruit to the left. However, it is not necessarily a picture of either, but rather an evocation of the artist’s feelings and memories at the specific moment of its making. The flowers may be ‘artificial’ because they are recreated, painted, not ‘real’.
Artificial Flowers dates from 1975, and is easily the most recent picture currently on display in our main galleries. During the 1970s, Hodgkin worked on wooden supports such as door panels and old boards, displayed unframed, to stress the nature of a painting as ‘object’. Here he skilfully combines opaque blocks of paint with veil-like washes in a decorative patterning that recalls the Indian Pahari miniatures which he avidly collects. A vibrant but carefully considered arrangement of zesty colours and assertive forms, Artificial Flowers demands attention – and stays in the mind.
| What is your favourite work of art in the Barber Institute galleries? Drop us a line at info@barber.org.uk and let us know, and we could feature your choice in a future Picture of the Month. |