CHARL BLIGNAUT shares lunch and ideas with Robert Hodgins, man of vision and painter extraordinaire
‘BETWEEN 12.30 and 3pm I paint in my underpants or not at all,’ says 76-year-old artist Robert Hodgins of the heat that, throughout summer, converts his makeshift outdoor studio into a sweltering greenhouse.
Pretty apt, the greenhouse, I decide after walking through the space and surveying his works in progress. With all the richness of imagery dredged up, Hodgins’s characteristic paintings ‘ of vain and decaying dictators, of childlike naivety and menacing glamour, of transforming beasts in pinstripe suits ‘ are like terribly beautiful orchids.
I am at his home to have lunch and to discuss the monograph of his work that has arrived in bookstores and galleries just in time for Christmas. Produced by Susan Glanville of The Project Room with text by Hodgins’s literary soulmate, journalist Ivor Powell, everyone involved seems happy with the product. While Hodgins has finally been recognised as one of the great South African painters, the monograph is intended to further spread his work.
But while he wanted the book to be published, it still throws him that people are so interested in his paintings, in ‘these canvases of smeared mud’. For him the painting process is a personal playground and he’s as flattered as he is ruffled by how Powell ‘intuits’ more than I thought was in the paintings’.
Who, I want to know, does he paint for? ‘For someone who is intelligent, sensitive, stroppy, with not too much of an ideological thrust: in short, for many versions of myself.’
Standing in the warm studio, something about Hodgins’s work clicks into place. Process. The man is currently working on 15 paintings. That morning he had painted on four of them as the mood took him. He develops obsessions with works, can’t continue on others. Either way, he will have to wait for the paint to dry (‘yellow takes ages’) before continuing. He describes himself while painting as ‘terribly alert’. The process is, I decide, decidedly organic.
‘Painting is a continuous, living, developing thing … Each painting is a process of constructing the next one. The next canvas is that extra bit of life. Painters are normally painting the day before their final heart attack.’
When I call Powell up a few days later, I ask him what it’s like to live with a Hodgins painting (of which he owns one of the finest collections in town). Says Powell: ‘I never get tired of them, they continue having their little moments.’
At the door to the studio, the artist is announcing the lunch menu, much of which was grown in his garden. ‘How do you know when a painting is finished?’ I ask, as we stroll past a healthy-looking herb garden. Hodgins chuckles and turns his attention to Annie the dog who has had an accident and severely hurt her foot.
Later, after lunch, the conversation takes several charmed turns. The thing about Hodgins, one realises, is what an incredible memory he has for detail. And the fertile, gentlemanly imaginings evident in his paintings are clearly drawn from memories of both experience and the books that he loves to read.
He has tales to tell ‘ of a working-class education and Miss Locke who had him reading Dostoevsky in the park; of the smell of 1953 primroses each time spring comes; of making it through the war without a scratch, instead discovering modern poetry, of the thrill of discovering literary painting (‘decayed Victorian infantility’); of why religion makes his hackles rise and the blinkers come down …
His life and his career are at that stage that a book should be written ‘ which is what Powell has been planning all along. For now, however, the monograph published this week will have to do.
The Hodgins monograph is obtainable at selected branches of Exclusive Books and Facts and Fiction, the Goodman Gallery (Johannesburg), the H’nel Gallery and the SA National Gallery (Cape Town) or direct from The Project Room 083 3798584