Daily Art Appreciation
“I think to speak to as many people as possible [through my art] is not a vain ambition. The kind of sensual/romantic/passionate/emotional feelings that artists have, do appeal to people. The only way an artist can communicate with the world at large is on the level of feeling. I think that the function of the artist is to practise his art to such a level that, like the soul leaving the body, it comes out into the world and affects other people.”
Howard Hodgkin interviewed in 1978 cited in: Exh. Cat., London, Tate Britain (and travelling), Howard Hodgkin, 2006, p. 181
Executed in 1979–82, Howard Hodgkin’s Counting the Days is aglow with vivid swathes of colour. Surpassing the confines of language, the artist’s palette operates as a kind of visual encyclopaedia of instinctual emotion and guttural force. Dappled bursts of colour — in rosy pink, umber, cobalt blue, vibrant yellow and deepest black — disband from the centre of the work, seeping over the edges and spilling onto the richly saturated frame. Almost entirely submerged in painted torrents of sun-drenched yellow, dazzling orange and flaming vermilion, the frame appears to shroud the composition in a halo of iridescent light. Composed at the apex of Hodgkin’s career, Counting the Days is a resplendent example of Hodgkin’s visual idiom and was notably exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1984. Potently alluring and intriguingly profound, it is comparable to the many paintings held in prestigious museum collections worldwide, from the Tate Modern, London, to the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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