Howard Hodgkin Quotes

• You keep on balancing and balancing and balancing until the picture wins, because then the subject’s turned into the picture.

  Howard Hodgkin

• When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else.

  Howard Hodgkin

• The picture surface recedes just as much in the 20th century as it did in the 15th. The techniques of making pictures have hardly changed.

  Howard Hodgkin

• My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldn’t be able to say anything.

  Howard Hodgkin

• My friends tend to be writers. I think writers and painters are really all the same-we just sit in our rooms.

  Howard Hodgkin

• Matisse was very clear about saying that you have to blow your own trumpet and explain yourself, which I think has been slightly forgotten.

  Howard Hodgkin

• In the United States there has been a kind of a structure in the Modern art world. The New York School was nearly a coherent thing-for a minute.

  Howard Hodgkin

• In England, it’s thought to be morally suspect to worry about what your surroundings look like.

  Howard Hodgkin

• I’m vulnerable to criticism. Any artist is, because you work alone in your studio and, until recently, critics were the only way you’d get any feedback.

  Howard Hodgkin

• I’m very envious of the few artists who are any good and still do portraits.

  Howard Hodgkin

• I want my pictures to be things. I want them to be made up of marks that are physically and individually self-sufficient.

  Howard Hodgkin

• I think words come between the spectator and the picture.

  Howard Hodgkin

• I think that words are often extraneous to what I do.

  Howard Hodgkin

• I once was interviewed and got so exasperated that I said, ‘What do you want, a shopping list?’ They kept asking, ‘What’s in this picture?’

  Howard Hodgkin

• I look at my pictures, and I think, ‘Well, how did I do that?’

  Howard Hodgkin

• I hate painting.

  Howard Hodgkin

• I find old copies of National Gallery catalogues, which are written in the dryest possible prose, infinitely soothing.

  Howard Hodgkin

• I fell through a crack for years. Historically, I am a nothing because I fit in no category. I can only be me.

  Howard Hodgkin

• I don’t think you can lightly paint a picture. It’s an activity I take very seriously.

  Howard Hodgkin

• I don’t really have a historical overview of my work at all. I’m not an art historian. I don’t see that there’s this period and that period.

  Howard Hodgkin

Howard Hodgkin (26)

Birth:	6th August, 1932
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Painter

About

Sir Gordon Howard Eliot Hodgkin was born in Hammersmith, London, England. He is a British painter. His work is most often associated with abstraction. He studied at the Camberwell Art School and later at the Bath Academy of Art in Corsham. In 1984, he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, in 1985 he won the Turner Prize, and in 1992 he was knighted. In 2003, he was appointed by Queen Elizabeth II as a Companion of Honour. A major exhibition of his work was mounted at Tate Britain, London, in 2006.

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