Life's Pleasures Quote by Howard Hodgkin

Hodgkin turns confession into a kind of manifesto: collecting isn’t a hobby he can take or leave, it’s an appetite. The line works because it refuses the moral makeover we usually give consumption. Instead of dressing acquisitiveness up as “curation” or “investment,” he calls it extravagance, then doubles down by comparing it to overeating. That analogy lands with a wince: collecting is pleasure, compulsion, and self-knowledge all at once, and he’s not begging to be absolved.

The sly pivot is “a way of being.” For an artist, objects aren’t inert trophies; they’re companions, prompts, a portable education in taste. Collecting becomes a daily practice of looking - training the eye through proximity and repetition. When Hodgkin says he’s “one of nature’s shoppers,” he’s mocking both the romance of the solitary genius and the pieties of anti-consumer purity. “Nature” is the joke and the alibi: he frames acquisitiveness as instinct, not ideology, but the humor also hints at unease about desire that never quite resolves.

Context matters: Hodgkin’s work is saturated with memory, interiors, and the charged atmosphere of rooms. Collecting, in that light, isn’t separate from painting; it’s part of building the emotional architecture he paints from. The subtext is that taste is made materially, not abstractly - by what you choose to live with, what you can’t stop wanting, what you bring home and keep.