Mark sent me the music from America which I listened to and then I

Mark sent me the music from America which I listened to and then I sent him the design, which was made into a backdrop, and then he choreographed using the music and the backdrop. The first time I ever saw a theatre design I’d done, for Covent Garden, I just couldn’t believe the scale, a tiny brush stroke ends up huge. You have to be very aware of scale whatever the size of the piece you’re working on. I designed the backdrop for the Mark Morris dance group which came to Sadler’s Wells in October, which was an amazing commission. Theatre (right) is a conflation of two or three real theatres and the feeling of being in a theatre, the anticipation I like working in the theatre very much. Mywork is a personal view on what painting is and can do.”`Memories’, 1997-99, and `Theatre’, 1998-99″These two works are combinations of particular events and of generalised experiences.

Memories (above) is like most people’s actual memories, an accretion of things. Some artists are quick developers and get stuck in a groove early on, but it took time for me to develop. My friend Patrick Caulfield says painters never stop working, and I do work very hard. “I don’t think it helps it to be taken seriously.”

New works by Howard Hodgkin can be seen at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, 9, 23, 24 Dering Street, London W1, 12 November to 15 January 2000 (0171-499 4100).
`End of the Day’, 1999 “All the paintings in my exhibition are oil on wood but they vary in size.

I try very hard to limit the kind of marks I use, they are very simple, very straightforward, they’re what I call my language My paintings sometimes take a number of years to complete. End of the Day is quite small, and refers to a particular end of day I’m often asked about my brushwork. Most of all he regrets the low regard in which painting is held, although he says there are signs of a resurgence “It is still done so much by amateurs,” he notes. It’s a measure of how much the art scene has changed since then that he is now viewed by some as establishment: his paintings grace government buildings, he is to be spotted at gatherings of the great and the good, while recent public commissions have included the giant mural for the British Film Institute’s new Imax cinema in London and New Worlds, for the Post Office’s millennium stamp series. In fact Hodgkin, now 67, is if anything anti-establishment, and dismissive of the Government and its vaunted promotion of Britain as a hothouse of creativity “Politically, art is nobody’s priority,” he asserts. “As with all forms of art, some is terrific and some isn’t,” is the nearest this country’s great abstract colourist gets to a criticism of the continuing hegemony of art-school cleverness at The Tate and elsewhere Hodgkin himself won the Turner, in 1985.