It is an incontrovertible fact that, probably owing to their character, abstract or non-representational paintings and sculptures have had more verbiage spilled over them in recent years in proportion to their output, especially by the artists themselves, than is the case of figurative art. In the belief that painters are less prone to self-analysis than their abstract brothers, the Editor has invited a number of them to furnish their views on their art in reply to some questions put by The Studio. The first is ELIOT HODGKIN, well-known English painter in tempera.

On the assumption that it is the abstract basis of work of art which raises it above mere imitation of observed reality, to what extent do you formulate your paintings from visual data?

It is not ‘the abstract basis of a work of art which raises it above mere imitation of observed reality’. It is that element in art (of whatever kind) which cannot be expressed in words. It is that element which derives from the spirit of the artist and which raises – say – Rembrandt above Hals or Chardin above Oudry. The ‘abstract basis’ is just as important to a picture as the bones are to a human body, but it is the spirit which quickens.
To come down to earth, my own work is based entirely on visual data.

‘The tame delineation of a given scene’ was Fuseli’s condemnation of landscape painting. To what conscious motivation would you attribute your own avoidance of this tameness in composing a picture?

Whatever Fuseli may say, tameness besets abstract and representational painters alike. If, occasionally, I avoid tameness, it is because my subject matter has excited in me some emotion which I am able to convey to others.

If the artist is the focussing lens between reality and the canvas, what would you say was the prime conscious purpose in your painting which, for example, impels you to paint a work such as that reproduced?

I rarely have a conscious purpose. Certain things signal to me and I respond. Admittedly, the picture reproduced here was more consciously planned than most. It represents natural objects in colours verging on black and it is the pair to a similar picture in tones of white (rabbit’s skull, garlic, string, a mushroom, etc.). Once the idea had come to me, it was necessary to find the objects and arrange them on the panel, but they had to be things about which I felt some emotion in the first place.

Is the impulse of your work, would you say, intellectual (do you wish to create by rational method a semblance of something seen), instinctive (is painting an urge that works itself out on canvas with paint without visualizing the final result in either form or colour), or emotional (do certain shapes and association of shapes in depth and or in colour produce in you an effect of excitement you wish to re-convey)?

Emotional. It is not so much ‘the association of shapes in depth’ (if I understand what that means) which stimulates me, as the relationship of natural objects with each other. In so far as I have any conscious purpose, it is to show the beauty of natural objects which are normally thought uninteresting or even unattractive: such things as brussels sprouts, turnips, onions, pebbles and flints, bulbs, dead leaves, bleached vertebrae, an old boot cast up by the tide. People sometimes tell me that they had never really ‘seen’ something before I painted it, and I should like to believe this. (We all know of things we can no longer bear to look at since certain artists have painted them.) However much they may rationalize when invited to do so, I doubt if many artists know why they paint as they do. They have certain affinities and certain capacities and just blunder ahead. At the same time, if he is not to give up in despair, every painter must persuade himself that there is something, however modest, which only he can do. He must keep this always in view, during all the time he is doing heartbreaking unoriginal work. For myself, if I must put it into words, I try to look at quite simple things as though I were seeing them for the first time and as though no one had ever painted them before.

How great an element is chance in producing your painting?

It is by chance that I come across my subjects, by being aware at the right moment (it rarely happens): but chance plays little part in the execution of the picture.