Welgemeend August Art Month - 2019

8 Robert Hodgins loved words nearly as much as paintings, and using them with wit and intelligence was as much part of his practice as the action of painting. He was a determinedly figurative painter, largely because he wanted his viewers to recognise his ideas of life in the world approximating a stage with a series of performances in which we all are the stars. In almost every case, the title of a painting was extremely significant to him and would colour the viewer’s perception of his subject, or be so very bland as to further demand of us that the viewer that she or he should re-evaluate the subject figure of the painting. His discipline, technical control of materials and colour are evidenced in his execution of paint on canvas, but his views on “The Human Race” are full of satire and irony, and made as clear as what he often termed his “characters” by the captions for their settings on canvas. Hodgins made it clear that he viewed himself along with all of these characters, as wearing disguises and masks in order to make ourselves appear we wished to in the eyes of others. In the bound book of graphics titled The Human Race (produced as an artist’s book in a limited edition with The Artists’ Press and published by Goodman Gallery in 2002), the artist quoted the comic verse Wishes of an Elderly Man by the 20th Century English poet Sir Walter Raleigh ( definitely NOT the Elizabethan, dear boy! ... he would exclaim). The rhyme from 1923 amused him: I wish I loved the human race; I wish I loved its silly face; I wish I liked the way it walks; I wish I liked the way it talks; And when I’m introduced to one I wish I thought what jolly fun. Overleaf, Hodgins wrote his own response to the earlier writing: My problem is that more and more I like the human race ... to draw. Problems of an even More Elderly Man Robert Hodgins, 2002 Hodgins was amused, irritated, angered, intrigued, disappointed and entertained by the human condition in almost equal measures and dealt with his responses to life in the world around him by drawing and painting the sorts of iconic figures who people his views of humanity. His suspicion of self-inflated puffery in persons of supposedly high status became a sort of signature. Ignoble nobility, venal popes, untrustworthy clergymen, men in uniforms or formal suits of importance, disguised somehow by their clothing to compensate for their low morals, vicious demeanour, criminal intent, leering manners or lack of compassion, became the order of the day for the painter. Yet not all was cynicism and condemnation. He regarded ladies of ill repute, men in loud suits, bewildered ex-boxers struggling with the after effects of being too often battered, all with a degree of understanding, humour, and fellow-feeling. He feels for the Man with a Bandaged Foot , as he does for the dancing woman in Performance, Artist and Audience . They are injured physically or in their pride, for the entertainment of others. The boxer would seem to have larger issues than just his foot and the rather ironically, politely-named “artist and audience” are clearly a stripper and her gawkers. A ”little” man is writ large in his small and his apparently unimportant, small office. SATIRE AND IRONY were grist to the mill for this painter ... Many of these “characters” he had encountered as the child of a “working woman,” who never knew his father, often went barefoot in wet and cold London of the Depression years, who was sent out to work and taken out of school at just fourteen. Hardship was part of his young life and the experiences of selling newspapers in Soho between the wars, shipping out to South Africa thanks to a great uncle who lived in Cape Town’s dockland, then going to war, and working hard to gain an education in the harsh years which followed in post war London, all informed the artist’s view of the world as a stage and humans as players on that stage. “I have both a gimlet eye, as well as a critical reviewer’s training” Hodgins once said to me. He used a cheeky amusement at the antics of people with high standing in society, but also a sort of shocked horror of them, coloured with sympathy, in his depictions of his archetypes in his works. Your Friendly Garage Hand seems none too friendly and satirically named. The texts in the painting shown as incomplete words, reveal the artist’s feelings about this character. Services is cut off to read as vices, and repairs cut off to read as pairs, in the phrases depicted as “pairs done here” and “vices day & night.” Combined with the image of what Hodgins would have called “a bruiser” leaves us in no doubt as to the nature of the fellow with a spanner in his hand! Men in Bunks depicts men numbered as would be the case with prisoners, or men in military forces, but the interrelations of these particular men could be a little more suggestive. Down in the Valley is a markedly ironic title for a powerful painting, clearly not showing what the word