Indian View K

In Indian View K, Hodgkin resorts to various shades of one of his preferred colours, green. Against an ivory, pale background, the green frame and composition stand out with incredible vibrancy. The print was created after Hodgkin returned from one of his trips to India, one of Hodgkin’s favourite travel destinations as well as a muse in its own right of the artist’s oeuvre. In this print, Hodgkin sought to evoke the sights he encountered when he was travelling across the country by train. The framed, tiny representation worked to remind viewers of an old-fashioned train window, while the rich and bright colours evoke instead a green and fertile countryside field.

However, while the image may be representational, what mattered most to the artist was that each picture could re-present to himself and to the viewer an emotional state associated with a fixed moment in time, in this case, his travels to India. As Andrew Graham-Nixon noted about Hodgkin’s painterly language: “Hodgkin uses his own, self-created vocabulary of feather-edged bars, blobs, and bands and stripes of colour to create an image meant to exceed the formal nature of its devices, an image that conveys a feeling, and image that lives in the subtle play between its forms and the sudden shaft of reality that it seeks to communicate.”