Howard Hodgkin in the New Statesman

I have ways of making yellow melancholy, says Howard Hodgkin. And he has. Hodgkin has been manipulating colour for 60 years and he can make it say exactly what he wants it to. Hodgkin is now 82 and physically frail but not when he has a brush in his hand. Then he uses paint like a poet, creating pictures that are usually small and in which memories of friends, places, dinner parties, feelings find expression in colour-saturated brushstrokes. His pictures stand between abstraction and figuration and he is, in his own words (which he has tired of hearing thrown back at him) a figurative painter of emotional situations.

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