Howard Hodgkin – Scotland

Whenever I look at one of Howard Hodgkin’s paintings, I confront his often-repeated insistence that he was not an abstract painter. And yet here I am, looking at an arrangement of colour that at first glance does not look like the world out there or any of the objects or figures that populate it, so it must be abstract, right? What I see is colour, paint and the clear evidence of the artist’s hand, his mark-making. But then there are the titles, in this case ‘Scotland’, and the extended date of its execution, 1994-95 that belies what appears to be rapid and spontaneously applied brushwork that must be related to the abstract expressionists. It is well-attested that Hodgkin would often spend a very long time considering what he was about to paint before actually applying any pigment to a surface, as if the work was an intellectual conundrum that had to be solved in his mind first. So, is the painting representational? Does it suggest a Scottish landscape, perhaps one glimpsed through a window? Does it matter if it’s a particular landscape or could it be any Scottish scene that has inspired? Or is the title a red herring, a joke played on us by the artist as we struggle hermeneutically to interpret what might be uninterpretable? Maybe it’s not a landscape at all…maybe it represents an emotion rather than a place. Does any of this matter, and why should we care?

Howard Hodgkin, Scotland, 1994-95, oil on wood, private collection

One school of thought is that Hodgkin’s works from this period go beyond the question of abstraction versus representationalism and are instead more profoundly ontological. That is, they wrestle with philosophical concepts about the nature of being and reality. It would seem a little trivial in that context to ask whether some paint on a piece of wood looks vaguely like something in the external world. The proper question would be to ask what it means to exist, what is the nature of ‘reality’, what is the relevance of trying to interpret particulars when universals – for instance the concept of colour or movement (or looking) - are more compelling? The Hodgkins trope of painting over the frame of the ‘picture’ is not done just to remind the viewer that the work is a thing, made of wood and thickly applied and textured paint and the opposite of trompe l’oeil, but it’s also done to question the very idea that art can ever contain its subject, that it can ever be the last word on it or indeed the first, that it can ever pin down or comprehend what is real. The practice of true art transcends the boundaries, the frames, that are conventionally set for it, including physical and linguistic boundaries, and reaches instead for the ineffable.

These are deep waters, and in the end, it may be simpler to ask myself why do I like looking at this picture? Firstly, the relationships between the colours feels richly consonant and satisfying, even moving. This goes beyond the idea of a painting as a decorative object (nothing wrong with that, by the way). It goes back to the concept of the eye, trained from birth in the ways of nature, being pleased or moved by certain colour juxtapositions. Secondly, I sense dynamism, intensity and drama and a primitive force glimpsed, an anima embodied by the artist that drives the work, a force whose energy has an ungovernable rhythm. Maybe this is a painting about the practice of painting, the messy business of laying down pigment according to unfathomable impulses. Thirdly, to see as if in close-up, the action, the process of drawing a paint-loaded brush across a surface is something that we usually only see if we peer closely or use a magnifier.

Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas (detail), 1656, oil on canvas, Museo del Prado, Madrid

To zoom in on, for instance, the fingers of Valasquez’s hand as he portrays himself in Las Meninas, is to witness the very act of creation itself, as the grasp of his fingers, rendered with such few suggestive economical smears of oil pigment were a representation of the alchemy involved in art-making. Hodgkin gives us this writ large. The painting conjures, lays bare if you like, its own facture and there is a directness, an integrity to this which I admire.

In Scotland, we see a broad sweep of emerald-green partly enclosing a much darker cobalt green inner ‘frame’, and within that are horizontal bands of fiery cadmium red and orange morphing into magenta. More green bands sit above this with whisps of yellow and turquoise. Some of the flame colour is left exposed on the painted frame, as pentimenti (remnants of earlier paint application) particularly on the left-hand side but also at each of its corners. It’s as if the boxed green window-like surround can barely contain the elemental energy it parades within it. Its potency has escaped confines and so has become somehow doubly exteriorised.

This work evokes for the viewer the gesture of painting with an immediacy that feels urgent and vital. Yet at the same time as works like this are self-referential (painting about the business of painting), and almost meta-theatrical in its adoption of a quasi-proscenium arch whose fourth wall is broken, it also conjures the world of outside landscape from inside an enclosed space. Indeed, space could be an underlying theme – what it means to exist in it, how to observe it is to change it, how it exists physically and psychically. It feels to me like Hodgkin wants to explore the sense of liminality, the hovering on a threshold between inside and outside, that can be both exciting and intimidating. He uses the language of colour and topographical form to give voice and shape to this indeterminacy.

Although the hand of the artist is decisive in Scotland in its vigorously confident and expansive mark-making, there is a serendipitous element to the results of such gestural action that renders it more deeply immersive. I like the broken edges of the greens where they meet the inner square, their accidental stuttered spatter. I also like the way that the wet-on-wet lines of the different greens of the ‘frame’ comingle and align themselves like brushed hair – which is what they are made by of course, the bristles of a broad brush. They tell you how the marks were made while simultaneously seeming to say, ‘doesn’t this effect look good?’. As Julain Barnes put it in Keeping an Eye Open when comparing different art forms like drama, music, opera: ‘Painters are envied because their art combines the means of expression and the expression itself in the same act and place; contained, and the more powerful for its containment.’

The question of whether or not Scotland is an abstract work may be safely set aside. Just as poetry can evoke images and feelings through connotation or sound without literal narrative meaning, so painting can be allusive rather than illusionistic, and different viewers can take different things from the same painting. For me, the fluidity and chromatic ferocity of Scotland speaks of an elemental and untameable climate whose beauty is savage and threatening, and which is possibly not kept outdoors quite enough for comfort.