Seafood 2001

Howard Hodgkin made this painting, Seafood, with layers of blues that drag into a kind of dark, underwater dreamscape. Imagine him leaning in close, brush loaded, making the blue frame, then scraping and swirling the darks in the middle like seaweed. You get the sense Hodgkin was really working the surface, pushing the paint around until it felt right. It's like he’s trying to capture a memory or a feeling more than a literal scene. The paint's thick in some spots, thin in others, and that variation gives it this incredible texture. That looping gesture in the center, those dark swirls, they feel almost like a hidden rhythm or a secret language. And then the speckled background… it adds this shimmer, like sunlight filtering through water. Hodgkin’s work has this way of hinting at something just beyond reach, doesn't it? Like a fragment of a story or a half-remembered place. And that's what makes it so compelling. He was really onto something!