Flowering Palm
Signed Print

Flowering Palm is perhaps one of the most representational and clearly decipherable of Hodgkin’s Palm series, in a clear departure from the abstract and dynamic language of his Black and Night Palms. Here again, Hodgkin returns to the motif of the palm, an image the artist was dearly attached to. Palms attracted Hodgkin for varying reasons, which the artist recounted in many interviews throughout his life. Chief among them, was that palms reminded Hodgkin of his exotic trips to India and Morocco, which he tried to visually evoke and reminisce in many of his paintings. Additionally, painting palms lent itself perfectly well to the brash painting technique that Hodgkin clearly loved: for the artist, painting entailed gestural freedom and expressiveness. The undulated motif of the palm leaf was well suited to Hodgkin’s preferences and encouraged the artist to reiterate the motif over and over.