Gardening

Howard Hodgkin is known especially as a brilliant colourist whose paintings, based on remembered experiences, uniquely straddle representation and abstraction. His study of Indian painting, and in particular its bold palette and illusionistic pattern, was an important influence on his work. Gardening marks the beginning of the artist's interest in reconciling figurative and abstract imagery. It flirts with the decorative and painterly caricatures of early Pop Art, though Hodgkin's imagery seems more quirky and personal than Pop Art's early images of popular culture. The loosely-painted figure in Gardening is a portrait of the artist's wife Julia,