The second museum exhibit I attended today was at the San Diego Museum of Art; Howard Hodgkin’s Time and Place, 2001-2010. Howard Hodgkin is a British artist and this exhibit presents twenty-four paintings completed between 2001 and 2010. His paintings seek to evoke memories and emotions through distinctive use of color and brushstroke and the idea of landscape and nature emerge as a central theme in this particular group of paintings. Recently, the SDMA acquired the painting Hotplate for their collection. It is a small painting, 12 by 12. Painted stripes in orange, greens and some yellow and the paint extends onto the picture frame. Some of my favorites from this collection are:
Rough Sea- an abstract painting of different shades of blue painted on wood. In fact Hodgkin like to paint on wood rather than canvas. He also likes to include the frame as part of the painting.
Snow Cloud- a small dark cloud white, gray and black over an orange. Hodgkin uses bold strokes in all his paintings, which are all very abstract and simple in design. It looks like he uses a large brush to do his work.
He places wood into a frame and then paints the wood and continues onto the frame. Often the colors he uses and the titles of his paintings refer to nature.
My favorite painting that he did was called Deep Autumn. He used only the color black in this painting and placed the painting in a black antique frame. It was all black strokes and dabbles and again the paint extends onto the frame. I found the painting especially beautiful and was surprised since it was all in black.
Finally, I really liked In Egypt. This was a very large painting, probably 5ft by 5ft. It was a large piece of unframed wood. There were large black dabbles all over the painting, then in the center, it looks like a blue palm tree, but this is what I see in the painting. His work is totally abstract. I really liked the simplicity of his work, the large brushstrokes, the fact that he worked on wood and painted his frames and used lots of bright colors in his work. If you want to see something different go and visit his work at the SDMA.
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