Notes

1. Molly

2. Alexander Not So Great

3. Julia

4. Pallas Athene

5. Ou Maat

6. Football Jack

7. Ready for Parade

8. One of Those Louis

9. Cadet

10. Redcap

11. Girl Perturbed

12. George Washington

‘Ceramic painting resembles methods used in tempera painting where colours are built up in layers. Line and brushwork are intermingled and images appear and, with rapid scouring, slowly disappear. Hodgins observes that ‘one can add and invent [in a way that is not] possible on a canvas’. Once the plates are dry they may be worked again. Hodgins experiments with all the possible surfaces and forms, from coffee mugs to vases, three-dimensional skull forms to figurative objects, with the round plate remaining a favourite.

Hodgins’s plates are portraits in the round. The format is of no major concern to him although the circular throwing lines sometimes lead him into a specific direction or gesture. The circular possibility of banding (painting of colours in the round) is usually only decided on after the images are completed. Some plates may take weeks to finish and others are completed almost instantly.

The lack of spatial reference is important in Hodgins’s ceramic work. ‘The plates in themselves are objects to me,’ Hodgins suggests. ‘They occupy space and to also allude to space seems superfluous. The canvas on the other hand is a square flat plane that receives a frame and is different to plates that already have an obvious rim.’ The rim, however, also forms part of the picture … sometimes. There is never a hard and fast rule with Hodgins. Today it can be decorative rims only and next week the rims are completely negated.’1

1. Retief van Wyk (n.d.) Robert Hodgins, http://map-southafrica.org/artists/m/2006/robert_hodgins/

Literature

Retief van Wyk (2008) The Ceramics of Robert Hodgins, Cape Town: Bell-Roberts, illustrated on pages 68 to 77 and 129 to 131.