I don’t know how to write about paintings.  The reasons for this may be quite simple – that I lack the vocabulary, the training, or the confidence –  but I think it’s something else.  When I stand in front of a painting I like, searching for words to describe its effect on me strikes me as absurd.  I don’t look to music when I’m trying to express the impact a novel has on me, so why should words help me when it comes to paintings?

I called into one of Gagosian’s galleries on the Upper East Side a few days ago to look at eighteen recent paintings by Howard Hodgkin.  I’ve loved his work for years.  He claims (sincerely or mischievously?) to be a representational painter, but I’ve never been able to relate his works to the titles he gives them or to see the figures and so on that others claim to identify so easily.  What I see are smears, splodges and stipples of color – nothing more. That’s not a complaint – quite the opposite.  Standing the other day in front of Hodgkin’s recent paintings,  all of them oil on wood, they had the same effect as almost all his paintings have had on me over the years.  They don’t provoke particular thoughts or specific feelings.  The sensation is something akin to being stunned or absorbed by color.

See.  I told you I don’t know how to write about paintings.  It doesn’t matter.  To quote Popeye, I yam what I yam.  And the paintings were gorgeous.