Creativity Quote by Howard Hodgkin

For an artist like Howard Hodgkin, that line lands less as anti-intellectual posturing than as a quiet refusal to let language bully sensation into a neat storyline. “Extraneous” is a surgical word: not useless, not hostile, just beside the point. It signals a practice built around what painting can do when it isn’t auditioning to become an essay.

Hodgkin’s work is often filed under the convenient label of abstraction, but the real engine is memory and emotion rendered as color events. The paintings don’t depict a dinner party or a heartbreak; they metabolize it. That’s the subtext: words arrive too late, after feeling has already happened, and they tend to sand down the jagged, private specificity that makes an experience worth painting in the first place. By calling words “often extraneous,” he’s also pushing back against the museum-industrial demand that art come with a caption-ready thesis. In a culture that treats explanation as proof of seriousness, Hodgkin insists that intensity can be the argument.

The intent is practical, not mystical. He’s acknowledging a division of labor: criticism and biography can orbit the work, but they can’t replace the encounter. His paintings, thick with layered color and those decisive, frame-like borders, function like emotional architecture - you enter them, you don’t translate them. The line also has a defensive elegance: it protects the studio as a place where ambiguity isn’t a problem to solve but the whole point.