Frances Hodgkins

Frances Hodgkins (1869-1947) was born in 1869 in Dunedin, then New Zealand's leading centre for the arts. After her early success as a watercolorist she became one of the leading artists of British modernism.

Frances Hodgkin's work is often a dairy of her life. She draws on what she interacts with on a daily basis. For example some of her landscapes are looking through her bedroom window. There is a huge amount of space in the front of the window and in the distance human life. Something from her life is always evading a space - a parrot - a lampshade on a stand.

Hodgkin's style and technique

The materials she used were watercolour and gouache.

Her style was abstract with clear brushstrokes and muddy colours. She used water saturated paper, a loose colour base and layers of detail. . Many landscapes show a dappled effect where the paint is let dry and the layering technique entailed thicker and thicker paint on top. Hodgkins often used portrait oriented rather than the more traditional landscape oriented paper.

Hodgkin's technique:

Draw out landscape in pencil
Completely wet the paper
Paint in one colour
Dry
Use stronger colours with wet lose paint
Splodge in darker colours
Use slightly heavier paint and let dry
Go back over the pencil lines
Tighten up the outlines
Physically draw around shapes to highlight with charcoal or pastels

Note that Hodgkin's work is not always true to colour.

 

Internet resources

Examples of Frances Hodgkin's work can be found on the Dunedin Public Art Gallery site: with further examples at: El Poder de la Palabra (The Power of the Word).

There are a couple of black chalk drawings of English landscapes on the Art New Zealand magazine website. Some magnificent landscapes from around the world are on the the Modernist Journals Project. One of the landscapes seen on this site even manages to incorporate a still life.

Frances Hodgkins spent a lot of time in England. Their Government Art Collection holds several landscapes.

The Southern Heritage Trust has produced a map of the Dunedin of Frances Hodgkins.