Blue Listening Ear

London: Bernard Jacobson Ltd, 1986. Lift-ground etching and aquatint with carborundum from three aluminium plates printed in different tones of red, warm black and cool black, with hand colouring in cobalt blue egg tempera on TH Saunders NOT paper (240 msg). Inscribed "A.P.," one of 10 artist's proofs. Signed with initials and dated 86 in pencil, lower center. Printed and hand-coloured by Jack Shirreff at the 107 Workshop, Wiltshire. A superb example of Hodgkin’s painterly printmaking, by a master colourist and one of Britain’s foremost modern artists.

Born in London and educated at Camberwell School of Art and the Bath Academy, Hodgkin emerged (truncated) as one of Britain's foremost artists. He represented the United Kingdom at the 1984 Venice Biennale, won the Turner Prize in 1985, and was knighted in 1992. Though often grouped with post-war abstraction, he described his works as representational paintings of emotional situations, compressing memories of people and places into luminous, frame-like fields of colour. In 1977, Hodgkin turned to printmaking with a new urgency that paralleled upheavals in his private life. As Hodgkin later reflected, a life-threatening bout of amoebiasis in 1975, followed by the artist's coming-out and separation from his wife had a liberating effect on his work, not only on content, but also on style. Within a decade the painter had forged an entirely personal print language, one that treated every sheet as a unique, painted object. Hodgkin approached printmaking with the same painterly urgency that drives his oils on wood. Working with master printers, he layered lithography, etching, aquatint and carborundum to build rich textures, then returned to each sheet with brushes of gouache or tempera. Hand-colouring, sometimes executed by trusted assistants under his close direction, turns every impression into a unique object, blurring the boundary between print and painting. Across all media Hodgkin's saturated palettes owe debts to Matisse, Vuillard and the miniature paintings of India, a country he visited almost annually from the 1960s onward. His rhythmic borders and tactile surfaces have influenced generations of contemporary printmakers, offering a model for how reproducible media can still carry the immediacy of a painting. The year 1986 opened a mature phase in Howard Hodgkin's graphic art. Teaming up with master-printer Jack Shirreff at the 107 Workshop, Wiltshire, he adopted carborundum, a gritty silicon-resin paste that is brushed or even finger-pressed onto the plate, then inked in relief. Combined with lift-ground etching and aquatint, the method let Hodgkin embed colour physically into the paper, raising velvety ridges and eliminating the need to draw lines. He called the process marvellously liberating, and after mastering it he rarely returned to traditional lithography. The title of the present work, which was produced through this technique, hints at synaesthesia: a glowing ultramarine rectangle seems to emit sound, surrounded by a rust-red field whose brushed carborundum lends granular depth. The unique surface that pools and blooms invites slow visual listening. Created nearly a decade after the 1977 interiors, the print marks Hodgkin's technical expansion into carborundum and a more sensuous, almost musical colour space. Carborundum gave Hodgkin the printing medium that finally matched his painting: deeply textured, palpably physical surfaces in which colour does all the storytelling. Works published from 1986 onward therefore mark the definitive, mature statement of his print practice, prints that are at once sculptural objects and concentrated bursts of remembered sensation.

Heenk, Howard Hodgkin Prints: a catalogue raisonné, No. 73. (Inventory #: 42281)