Gregory Hodge: Figures, Lights, and Landscapes

With Kelly Gellatly

Over Zoom between Melbourne and Paris, Kelly Gellatly and Gregory Hodge discuss the artist’s forthcoming exhibition, the influence of Paris and art history on his painting and take a deep dive into his intriguing and complex working methods.

Gregory Hodge Autumn Landscape (detail), 2022 acrylic on canvas 195 x 130 cm Image courtesy the artist

Kelly Gellatly: You arrived in Paris at the start of your Art Gallery of New South Wales residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in October 2019 and have decided to stay. What does the city give to you and your work?

Gregory Hodge: It’s been a real opportunity being in Europe, and particularly in Paris. I think the main thing has been to really spend time looking. It’s always important to spend time looking at work, at exhibitions, at painting. I think though, being here, it’s been a more intentional part of my practice. I’m spending a lot of time looking at works of art in various collections. I see a lot of contemporary painting as well, which has been a really good thing.

KG/ Do you have favourites?

GH/ For this show, I’ve been regularly going through the Louvre tapestry collection and the Gobelins Manufactory to see the collections of tapestries there.

At the Musée d’Orsay and the Pompidou, favourite painters at the moment include Vuillard, Matisse and Van Gogh. You can see in their work not only the influence of the patterning apparent in carpets and textiles, but also how the richness of colour and intensity of their painted surfaces relate to the complex surfaces of woven fabrics and tapestries.

I also saw a beautiful show of textiles and paintings by Anni Albers at the Musée d’Art Moderne recently.

KG/ 17th-century tapestries have been of particular interest for your new body of work. Can you tell me a little about this? What is it that initially attracted you to them?

Gregory Hodge Window (detail), 2022 acrylic on canvas 195 x 130 cm Image courtesy the artist

GH/ I’ve always been interested in illusionistic painting and the long tradition of Trompe l’oeil mimicry—how paint can mimic other surfaces—like imitation painted marble on the walls of ornate rooms.

For these new paintings, I spent a lot of time in collections here and it wasn’t the paintings that I was really absorbed in and found myself returning to, but the tapestries. What I’m really drawn to in these tapestries is the way that in weaving together different coloured threads, the image is embedded in the picture plane—it’s not sitting off the surface like a painting does, it’s embedded in the warp and weft of the thread.

My work comes from this complex roundabout way of looking at something that’s not a painted surface, and that’s generally representational and trying to understand how to use paint and develop tools to mimic that surface, but also how to do this in a way that’s within a language of abstraction.

KG/ I’ve always been fascinated by the way in which many artists use a kind of a system or structure, or a means of limitation, to move their practice to wherever they think it needs to go. You obviously create these kinds of structures within your own work, am I right?

Gregory Hodge in his Paris studio 2022.

Photo: Janelle Sweeney

GH/ That’s a really good way to put it, and sometimes you don’t know that’s what you’re doing. Within all that complex kind of problem solving there are parameters, but maybe not intentionally at first. Initially, it feels like everything is potential—and then, through the editing process you narrow things down. My work is formed out of a process – from constructing the tools to make certain marks, to trying to generate surfaces that are painted but that look like other surfaces. Within all of that, you have to limit yourself.

KG/ I imagine there’s so much that you want to achieve, and then it’s honed down to get the kind of precision, and the juxtaposition and that jostling of different elements in your work. There’s a constant sense of movement that makes your eye bounce around the composition because you’re shifting from one element to the next and investigating the way they intersect and butt up against each other. With something that looks visually random, even if deliberately so, it takes real discipline and constant refinement to achieve that.

GH/ My paintings have a kind of visual intensity to them—there’s a stacking of space and elements. There are visual elements that you might see—a representational moment that is partially concealed by an abstract gesture, and then there may be another motif that lays over the top of that. Its full of hidden elements and things that are stacked and obscured and revealed.

I’m into Baroque ceiling paintings with tumbling figures falling out of space; limbs obscuring fabric, fabric obscuring landscape elements. I am also interested in modernist collage and the way in which collage is usually generated by combining materials, motifs or imagery that aren’t necessarily meant to go together.

Dane Lovett Foxglove 21, 2019 oil and acrylic on poplar panel 60.6 x 40.6 cm

KG/ You work with a lot of source material to help you construct the complex surfaces of your paintings. Are you ‘bowerbird-ish’ with these sources? Do you have piles of things that you can draw upon or do you approach it quite specifically, in that something will take you in a particular way and that will be a focus for a while? Can you talk us through the type of images you create and materials you work with prior to painting?

Gregory Hodge in his Paris studio 2022.

Photo: Janelle Sweeney

GH/ There’s a very formulaic way that I generate source material. I have a digital database of imagery that includes elements of my own paintings, whether it be gestures or a painted mark or something that I’ve used in previous work. I have a collection of things that I pull up and re-adapt into new paintings. So, on a very practical level, it’s files like ‘Gestural Marks’, ‘Painted Rocks’, or ‘Fabric’.

I have digital archives of collage material, and things that I’ve been photographing often find their way into the paintings—for example, close ups of tapestries that aren’t necessarily pictorial but might be more about the surface – elements that make me think, ‘How do I paint that?’ I’ve taken photos in the botanic gardens in Paris and developed tapestry-esque ways of painting. I generate digital and physical collages from that database. I print out some of this imagery and cut and slice them up, glue them together, re-cut them, paint over the top of them, and then sometimes I also scan and work on them in Photoshop.

As a result, elements of paintings from 2019, 2018, find their way back into new work—they get re-adapted and re-articulated with the new material. They may sometimes look intuitive, but they’re actually really contrived and thought out. I also do that as a means of removal that is quite intentional—how do I take steps from this other work to make it into something that’s different, that’s not necessarily a replication? There’s an adaptation. I get these weird moments that I would never have thought of through that source material process.

KG/ You make tools and adapt brushes to create the extraordinary surface effects on your paintings. Can you describe the type of devices you make and what you achieve with them? Is this something you continue to do, or have you now landed on a set range of tools to suit different purposes?

GH/ I have a resolved set of tools and others I keep refining. The tools are really specific to the kind of marks and surfaces that I want them to make. I spend so much time trying to work them out.

I make colourful ribbon-like marks that come out of a history of gestural painting. These gestures appear to be quick, but they’re actually rehearsed, as I’m copying a previous gesture that I’ve made before. There are tools that I’ve made specifically for those—multi-head brushes.

Several contemporary painters do this—Jack Witten, Bernard Frize, David Reed for example, but my works also echo Lichtenstein, who made paintings of gestures.

I also add shadows to gestures to make them appear as if they don’t live on the same surface of the painting, and there are particular tools I return to for that.

To paint woven surfaces, the warp and weft effect is made by very specific tools that I’ve created in the studio— sponges and trowels I cut up and drag paint through to generate these marks.

KG/ Despite the continuing conceptual and technical concerns across your practice, your work can change quite dramatically from series to series. Do you have a sense of what might be next for you?

GH/ I think this new series of paintings is just the beginning of a much larger body of work with hopefully a number of various iterations. The research I have been doing and the source material I’ve been making hasn’t been exhausted yet, so they will continue to inspire new work. Along with the paintings I have been making a series of coloured pencil drawings, some of which I will include in the show, and I am excited about that.

EXHIBITION: GREGORY HODGE, FIGURES, LIGHTS, ANDLANDSCAPES, 21 JUL – 13 AUG, 2022