Joan Hodes (1925–2022) was a British watercolourist and oil painter, best known for her landscapes of Britain, Ireland, and continental Europe.
Early life
Born in Hampstead, London, in 1925, Joan Blairman was the second daughter of Philip Blairman, an antique dealer, and his wife Celia. Her love of art and mountainous landscapes developed in Llandudno, North Wales, where her family had a holiday home and where they subsequently lived during World War II. At Gloddaeth Hall School for Girls in Llandudno, her artistic skills were encouraged, and at the age of 15, she was awarded certificates from the Royal Drawing Society in 1940. Her family relocated to New York the same year, where she attended Mamaroneck High School, winning a part-time art scholarship in 1942 before returning to Britain in 1943.
Art training
After the war, in 1945, Hodes attended the Slade School of Fine Art, studying under Franklin White and graduating in 1948. Several life drawings from her time at the Slade are held in the UCL Art Museum collection, including a drawing of Quentin Crisp, a frequent life model at art schools in London and the home counties. After graduating from the Slade, Hodes spent a year in Paris at the Académie Julian and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière where she continued to develop her interest in drawing. From 1947 to 1953, the Austrian expressionist Oskar Kokoschka accepted her as one of his small number of pupils while living in London. She recalled his training being 'a revelatory experience', teaching her to look at a subject more intensely as if she were seeing it for the first time, which led to her using a more contrasting palette with broader, bolder brush strokes.
Style and influences
Her early work, a series of pastel drawings and watercolours, owed a lot to Kokoschka's teaching, but later influences included Scottish artists Joan Eardley, Anne Redpath and John Huston. English art historian Michael Kauffman, writing in a solo exhibition catalogue in 1994, felt that her oil paintings also used bold colours in the "manner of Van Gogh". Although Kokoschka's expressionist style is evident in much of her work, where she juxtaposed figurative elements and abstract forms to create depth and a sense of mystery, his influence never compromised the variety of styles she used. Hodes used a number of different media, often in the same work, including pastel, chalk, charcoal, watercolour, and pen and ink, in a limited palette and sometimes sparingly to allow the paper to show through. The Suffolk coast near Aldeburgh, Snape, and Orford was a typical subject for Hodes, who also painted landscapes in Italy, Ireland, and Spain. Hodes' many sketchbooks revealed her desire to make studies en plein air in order to capture the unpredictable conditions of her favourite places: the windswept coasts of Suffolk and the mountains of Ireland, Wales, and the Mediterranean. She sketched out her scenes in situ before returning to her studio to create the final painting.
Career and reception
Beginning with the discipline of her training at the Slade, the subsequent development of her training in Paris, and the inspirational teaching of Kokoschka, Hodes' professional career spanned almost seven decades. Married in 1951 to Dr. Charles Hodes, the couple had three children: Deborah, Matthew, and Charlotte, who is also an artist. During the 1950s, Hodes continued to work, but, with limited time to paint while she raised her family, she produced a series of pastel drawings and watercolour compositions of her children using strong, contrasting colours that had an intimacy without sentimentalising their subject. In the 1960s, as her family grew older, Hodes taught art in secondary and adult education and began to work in oil, concentrating on landscape, mostly in locations she knew well in Britain and Europe.
For her first solo show at the Foyer Gallery in London in 1962, The Connoisseur concluded that "from the interest shown by visitors in the work of this new artist, I predict that Mrs Fairfax-Jones has picked yet another winner. Joan Hodes' work will surely soon appear in the West End".
Wild, open landscapes and her representation of reflections, light, and weather are consistent features in Hodes' compositions, but her bold use of colour is also a recurring theme. In 1970, a critic for Arts Review commented that colour was the primary quality of Joan's work, "where an intensification of observed natural hues gives an almost fauve effect".