Marcus Hodge

Marcus Hodge, at 45, is now secure in his reputation as one of the most successful portrait painters of his generation. But just as there is more to being an artist than a full book of portrait commissions, so there is rather more to Marcus as the artist he is.

The Portrait is one of the great subjects of the serious painter, but only one among several others - still life; landscape; narrative composition and so forth. Nor of course is there any actual requirement for the artist to specialise, and the broader his engagement, the richer the work as a whole is likely to be - or so one would imagine.

Yet with artists, as with everyone else, too wide a scope of interest and approach can be quite unsettling, and never more so than with the portrait-painter, of whom especially we seem to expect the narrowest specialisation. And the more successful the painter, the narrower his room for manoeuvre may well become. For as success breeds success, so any potential client is to only too likely to expect, and indeed require, more of the same. We too easily forget that a true work of art will always be something of a surprise, with the artist himself the first to be surprised.

Marcus has clearly been alive to just such traps and dangers from the start. And he had a good start. Leaving University with an economics degree and certain only that economics were not for him, he settled eventually upon painting. In this he was following his father, Spencer Hodge, himself a distinguished painter, and in 1989, on his advice, he enrolled at the Art School run on the traditional atelier model by the Spanish portrait and landscape painter, the late Joaquin Llado - the Free School of the Mediterranean, at Palma on Majorca

Whether by chance or design, this was for him a happy choice, for had he chosen instead an English Art School, he would have had, in the following five years, nothing of the hard study of the figure in the life room, founded on the old fundamental disciplines of observation and technique. Yet this too could have been a trap, leading to the conscious adoption of a classical manner as a point of principle, indulged for its own sake in defiance of modernism and all its works. For him it was but one sympathetic approach by which to engage with and express his experience of the visible world. His was no blinkered nor mannered view, for even then he was, as he remains, as fascinated and excited by such painters as Auerbach and Freud as by any of the old masters.

What particularly drew him to such work was the stuff of the paint itself, in its quality on the surface and in the manner of its handling. It is an instinctive expressionist sensibility and aesthetic which has grown ever stronger and more evident in his work over the years. Indeed in certain respects, most especially in the landscapes, it is now the predominant and, quite consciously so, the determining characteristic.

But, once out of art school, a viable career was the priority, and through the later 1990s it was on the portraits that he relied. Yet if this for a while was the more conventional and public face of his work, the broader scope of his interests, already well set in the Western Scottish Highlands, and, further afield, in Rajastan, with its village life and cattle fairs, would never narrow. And as he continues to visit and work compulsively in both countries, so the paintings that result have come into their own.

That is not to say that the portraits are now of less importance. Rather it is that an intriguing counterpoint operates across the work as a whole, each aspect complementing and enriching the other. The portrait commissions still come in with a gratifying regularity, with all their attendant constraints and expectations. Yet the formal discipline and technical finesse they require bring to the freer and more openly expressive work, and the Scottish landscapes in particular, a structural and technical integrity without which they could readily fall apart.

The Scottish paintings in particular, of Arisaig and Mallaig, Glens Coe and Affric, have developed now to a point at which, close on the surface, the statement is all but abstract, reduced to the basic simplicities of paint, mark and expressive gesture. The image remains clear throughout, yet true to that upland tumble of rock and stream as it may be, the work also remains true to itself as painting. For all painting is to an extent a fiction, which must first convince us on its own terms, if it is to carry us with it. The artist's first duty is never merely to the subject of the work, but to the work itself and what it requires of him

So off into the wilderness Marcus goes, loaded with small boards and panels on which to register, and with a most remarkable freedom and spontaneity, whatever takes his eye. Yet far more than mere studies for larger works, these small paintings are themselves properly resolved within their own terms, and as impressive as anything he does. They are certainly the most abstract. Rather more than that, their own expressive freedom informs not only the larger works to which they directly refer, but also seeps back subtly into the work at large. And for all the essential formal distance, of purpose and circumstance that necessarily sets the portraits apart from the landscapes, we can now find in them too an expressive fluency and lightness, and indeed a freedom, that perhaps we had never noticed before.

Thus, for all its apparent differences of method, interest and approach, Marcus's work comes together, all of a piece. For the underlying, determining painterly sensibility is always and necessarily the same. Rajastan is to be the next major project, when these same complementing forces will again come into play. Whatever and wherever, we can only look forward to the results.

William Packer
London - September 2011