Howard Hodgkin is one of the world's leading painters, whose art is admired both by critics and by a wide public. Beginning with a remembered experience, Hodgkin works on his seductive and complex paintings for long periods, characteristically producing richly coloured, sweeping compositions, which continue into the picture-frame itself. These paintings uniquely straddle representation and abstraction, at the same time as they demonstrate both an awareness of history and an understanding of art's potential today. Most recently, his interest in working in different scales, evident particularly in significantly larger paintings such as Americana and After Vuillard, demonstrates his concern to engage the viewer in new and challenging ways. In this interview, illustrated with many key paintings, Howard Hodgkin speaks with warmth and passion about his methods, about his influences, about colour and composition, and about the fundamental importance of painting. "You need things to look at," he says simply, "things to affect your feelings, and your intelligence, and your heart."

collection makes its own demands. Many artists have been collectors. I think of it rather as an illness. I felt it was using up too much energy.


QUOTES Howard Hodgkin

"A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object."
Howard Hodgkin

"Collecting has been my great extravagance. It's a way of being. I collect for the same reason that I eat too much-I'm one of nature's shoppers."
Howard Hodgkin

"I am happy for people to talk about my pictures, but I wish devoutly that I was not expected to talk about them myself."
Howard Hodgkin

"I am isolated as an artist, not as a person."
Howard Hodgkin

"I don't look at the work of my contemporaries very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It's much easier to get near their paintings."
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

"I don't think you can lightly paint a picture. It's an activity I take very seriously. "
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 find old copies of National Gallery catalogues, which are written in the dryest possible prose, infinitely soothing. "
Howard Hodgkin

I hate painting.
Howard Hodgkin

"I look at my pictures, and I think, 'Well, how did I do that?' "
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 think that words are often extraneous to what I do."
Howard Hodgkin

"I think words come between the spectator and the picture."
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'm very envious of the few artists who are any good and still do portraits."
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

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

"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

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

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

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

You keep on balancing and balancing and balancing until the picture wins, because then the subject's turned into the picture.
Howard Hodgkin