For a man who, as he puts it, lives a quiet, relatively isolated life, painting pictures in his studio, Howard Hodgkin manages to provoke some intemperate outbursts from his critics. These include Matthew Collings, Boswell to the Young British Artists collective Dr Johnson, who fumed that Hodgkin's work was for people who give dinner parties, not for people who are interested in art. Collings's antagonism was probably fuelled in part by the ecstatic reception accorded the artist's 20-year retrospective which toured venues in the United States and Germany before coming home to London's Hayward Gallery in 1997.
The funny thing about that exhibition was that it was extraordinarily popular with the non-art world audience, the very people who should, according to conventional critical opinion, be turned off by it, the audience that supposedly needs shock tactics and injections of irony to spark its interest in art. Yet here was a gallery filled with what were, essentially, old-fashioned, traditional paintings, not a pickled shark or a video projector in sight, and people loved it.
If you visit Hodgkin's current exhibition at the Anthony D'Offay Gallery, his first show of new work in London since 1993, it's not too difficult to see why they loved it.
Hodgkin's paintings are beautiful, boldly stated and often extravagantly coloured. While they usually have straightforwardly descriptive titles, such as Autumn Foliage or Once in Kashmir, they are not representational in the conventional sense of the term. They could reasonably be described as abstract in form.
In them, the physical world and the stuff of experience are translated into colour and gesture. And it's important to emphasis that the gesture isn't a self-conscious flourish but more the necessary, functional mark of the brush-stroke. It's a classical, restrictive language - as is theatre, for example - but capable of remarkable richness and intensity of expression, and of apparently endless reinvention.
It's true that it is the kind of painting that could prompt reams of purple prose, and has done so, but not from Hodgkin. He is extremely guarded in his own comments, and goes out of his way to avoid encouraging any pretentious responses.
"I can't analyse my own pictures," he explains. "The title is always the subject of the painting, and the subject never changes from beginning to end. From the very beginning, I try to express the subject. But it can be difficult." That seems like a characteristic understatement. He is famously slow about finishing work, as many of the dates on his pictures attest. After Matisse was begun in 1995 and completed this year. The surprising thing is that a handful of pieces were painted entirely in 1999.
He is candid about the process. "I tend to go back again and again to a picture, and I often find it difficult to make my mind up about how to proceed." A lot of time is spent just looking. In the past he has said that a picture is finished "when the subject comes back," but he means that in a particular sense. That is, he wants the painting to communicate itself to the viewer in place of the event or whatever it was that inspired it, not as a representation of the event.
There is one aspect of Hodgkin's work that bucks the easel painting tradition, and that is his habit of incorporating the frames in his paintings. "A lot of people have asked me when I started to do that, but I just know that it was a long time ago. I couldn't pin it down to a date." In fact the frame is part of the painting from the first, for he usually works on wooden panels of various kinds -
trays, table-tops, doors - and they are often old, cracked and a little battered. For an artist, there's nothing more intimidating than a blank white surface, so it's hard to believe that he doesn't relish these given surface marks as a means of jump-starting the process. Not so, he says. "They don't always have a previous history. I've had new boards cut to size to make paintings and I'm equally happy to work with them. If there are marks, there are marks. The main thing is that it's wood, and that it's strong enough so that I can do what I like with it." In the course of its making, a painting is likely to be scraped and banged and knocked about.
He was born in London in 1932, and lives and works there now, close to the British Museum. He's represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, he won the Turner Prize in 1985 and he was knighted in 1992 - the main effect of his knighthood, which he accepted after some hesitation, has been, he says, "to make people think I'm toffee-nosed". Though he was producing and selling work from the 1960s, it's no accident that the 20-year retrospective took 1975 as its starting point, for that is when his work attained a new breadth and maturity.
Although wary of equating life too closely with art, he has suggested that a brush with death in 1975, when he almost died of amoebic hepatitis, may have had an impact. Several commentators, including Bruce Chatwin, also point to the coincidence of his discovering his homosexuality towards the end of the 1970s. But, although he has been frankly matter-of-fact about this himself, he tends to discount its direct relevance to his painting.
Stylistically, his painting became simpler in form than it had been. In retrospect his earlier work, though it displays the same relish for colour and meticulous design, looks comparatively fussy and indecisive. In particular it evidences an uneasy compromise between representation and markmaking. The effect is comparable to the case of Mark Rothko. Having struggled with various pictorial approaches, Rothko suddenly and dramatically found his artistic voice in the late 1940s and never again lost it.
From the first, Hodgkin has been aligned with the strand of British painting that drew sustenance from France, and specifically from Post-Impressionism, including the Bloomsbury artists currently celebrated in a Tate Gallery exhibition. His family had links with the critic Roger Fry. There has traditionally been a distrust of sensual, colourist painting concerned with ocular pleasure in the mainstream of the British art world. As one contemporary English painter - not Hodgkin - put it to me a few years ago: "It's the Francis Bacon effect. Unless there's angst, you can't be serious."
Hodgkin has remarked on this tendency in the past but is more guarded now. "I was going to say something about the critical resistance to colour," he says at one point, "but I find whenever I've made these pronouncements in the past, whatever I've said turns out to be not quite true, so I'd better not say anything."
While Bonnard, with his rapt absorption in an intimate, domestic world, is an obvious exemplar, Hodgkin has also been strongly influenced by Indian painting, and has amassed a significant collection of Indian art. He first visited India in 1964. When he describes what excited him about Indian painting, you can immediately see its importance in relation to his own work. "In Indian painting, red flowers in front of a blue pool will be just that, red on blue. They don't have a source of light, or single viewpoint perspective, they render things in terms of flat, literal representations."
When I mention an old quote attributed to him, to the effect that being a painter is like receiving a life sentence in an open prison, he is taken aback. "Did I say that? I'm sure I didn't. I wouldn't say it now. It's true that I tend to spend a lot of time alone, in the studio, and it's not particularly enjoyable. Of course, I do have people around, doing various things for me, but I couldn't actually paint with anyone else in the room, so it is a lonely job. But I wouldn't complain unduly about it. It's what I do, I just stumble along, getting on with my work."
Aidan Dunne can be contacted at is at adunne@irish-times.ie
Howard Hodgkin: New Paintings is at the Anthony D'Offay Gallery, London until Jan 15th ET