Howard Hodgkin
Painted memories of rooms and encounters, in oil on wood, straight over the frame.
Howard Hodgkin was born in London in 1932, ran away from Eton twice, and trained at Camberwell and Bath. He always insisted he was a representational painter, which puzzled people, because the pictures look abstract: what they represent is not a scene but the memory of one — a dinner, a conversation, a room in India, held in a few broad gestures of very saturated colour. He worked on wooden panels and boards, often old ones, and carried the paint out over the frame so the picture has no clean edge. He won the Turner Prize in 1985, was knighted in 1992 and died in 2017.
Hodgkin worked extremely slowly, sometimes for years on one small panel, so the output is limited and dates on the reverse frequently span a long period — that is original and not a sign of alteration. The painted frame is integral and reframing destroys value; original frames should never be replaced. He was a major printmaker, working in intaglio and lithography with hand colouring applied afterwards, so impressions within an edition genuinely differ. Alan Cristea published much of the later graphic work.
If you own a work by Howard Hodgkin
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