Enlarge Steve McCurry

Steve McCurry’s “Afghan Girl,” photographed in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1984 on Kodachrome film.

Steve McCurry

Steve McCurry’s “Afghan Girl,” photographed in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1984 on Kodachrome film.

In 1984, photojournalist Steve McCurry was in an Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan. He followed the sound of voices to a tent where he found a group of girls. “I noticed this one little girl off to the side that had his incredible set of eyes that seemed almost haunted — or very piercing,” he tells NPR’s Audie Cornish.

McCurry snapped a picture that ended up on the cover of National Geographic’s June 1985 issue. “The Afghan Girl” became one of the magazine’s most widely recognized photographs — and one of the century’s most iconic. To get that shot, McCurry used a type of film that has become iconic in its own right: Kodachrome.

The film, known for its rich saturation and archival durability of its slides, was discontinued last year to the dismay of photographers worldwide. But Kodak gave the last roll ever produced to McCurry. He has just processed that coveted roll at Dwayne’s Photo Service in Parsons, Kan. — the last remaining location that processes the once-popular slide film.

Enlarge Ahmet Sel

Photographer Steve McCurry, 2002

Ahmet Sel

Photographer Steve McCurry, 2002

What’s on that landmark roll of film is still under wraps. It will be the subject of an upcoming documentary by National Geographic. What is known is that the first and last images are in New York City, McCurry’s home base. And between those frames are photographs from India, where McCurry established his career as a master of color photography.

Although he has almost a million images spanning 35 years in his Kodachrome library, he still felt the pressure of this assignment. Every one of the 36 frames on that final roll was precious. “Am I getting the right moment?” he wonders. “Is it in focus? Is the exposure right?”

So before he took one of those shots, he used a digital camera to hone in on the perfect exposure. “To have that reinforcement, to be able to see that on a two-dimensional screen … it was a big help,” he says.

And he’s got a piece of advice for amateur photographers with unused Kodachrome film lying around: Get it to Dwayne’s! The Kansas photo shop will stop processing Kodachrome rolls on Dec. 30. And while that will mark the end of an era of photography, the memories created with Kodachrome — like that Afghan girl’s green eyes — will live on.

David LaChapelle – Photographer and film director

Caravaggio is often called the most modern of the old masters – there’s a newness, a contemporary feel to his work that painting prior to him just didn’t have. It’s like when [fashion designer Alexander] McQueen came on the scene, everything else [in the fashion world] suddenly looked old. Caravaggio used light like a photographer and his pictures are cropped like photographs. One that sticks in my mind is Boy Bitten By a Lizard. That’s a beautiful example of the one-source light that we identify Caravaggio with, that he pioneered, but it’s also a wonderful captured moment, this boy’s sort of feminine reaction to the lizard’s bite. It’s a photograph before photography.

The flower in the boy’s hair and the blouse coming off his shoulders I think signify that the boy is a male prostitute. But in no sense does Caravaggio judge the boy. He didn’t strive to paint the court and the aristocracy – he was painting the courtesans and the street people, the hookers and the hustlers. That’s who he felt comfortable with, empathised with. Back then that was considered blasphemous but actually that’s where Jesus pulled his disciples from – the street people and the marginalised. That’s why in [my photography series] Jesus Is My Homeboy I had people from the street dressed in modern clothing, in modern settings, with Christ, because that’s who Jesus would be with if there was a second coming.

It’s through one of my contemporary art heroes, Derek Jarman, that I got really turned on to the artist. I’m really good friends with John Maybury whose mentor was Jarman and when Jarman’s film Caravaggio came out in the 80s I was living in London. It had a really big impact on me, I wanted to learn more about Caravaggio, I just loved his aesthetic. While Michelangelo was aspirational, using bodies at the height of perfection, Caravaggio was much more of a realist. The kind of beauty he depicts isn’t in any sense what we see traditionally in painting of that time. He always found beauty in the unexpected, the ordinary – in the street urchin’s face, the broken nose, and the heavy brow. That’s why Caravaggio is a very sympathetic figure to me. I too try to find the beauty in everyone that I photograph, whether it’s the kids in South Central LA who invented the new dance form I documented in Rize, or the transsexual Amanda Lepore who I’ve photographed a lot. People think she is freakish but I don’t – I love her.

Today, if you took a photograph with the type of bodies Michelangelo used it would look like a [Calvin Klein] Obsession advert, whereas Caravaggio depicted the elderly, the imperfect, even death. You never turn your head away from a Caravaggio piece no matter how brutal it is because there’s such a balance of horror, of unsightly bodies and violent scenes, with such great beauty.

Martin Scorsese – Film-maker

I was instantly taken by the power of [Caravaggio's] pictures. Initially I related to them because of the moment that he chose to illuminate in the story. The Conversion of St Paul, Judith Beheading Holofernes: he was choosing a moment that was not the absolute moment of the beginning of the action. You come upon the scene midway and you’re immersed in it. It was different from the composition of the paintings that preceded it. It was like modern staging in film: it was so powerful and direct. He would have been a great film-maker, there’s no doubt about it. I thought, I can use this too…

So then he was there. He sort of pervaded the entirety of the bar sequences in Mean Streets. He was there in the way I wanted the camera movement, the choice of how to stage a scene. It’s basically people sitting in bars, people at tables, people getting up. The Calling of St Matthew, but in New York! Making films with street people was what it was really about, like he made paintings with them. Then that extended into a much later film, The Last Temptation of Christ. The idea was to do Jesus like Caravaggio.

Taken from Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane by Andrew Graham-Dixon (Allen Lane). Read our review of this book

Peter Doig – Painter

It’s always a challenge for a contemporary artist to be of their time but when you look at Caravaggio’s paintings you can really imagine the context, because he used ordinary people and everyday clothes. The paintings feel very real. Edward Hopper, for instance, did the same. He was very aware of what people looked like in his time, what people were wearing. Equally Caravaggio’s paintings were obviously very brave when they were made and they continue to be viewed with that spirit, and that’s what’s so exciting. The paintings are quite sinister – they have an air of menace, and they’re obviously very sexual.

I first saw his work at the Royal Academy’s Painting in Naples exhibition in the early 80s. I was in my early 20s then and I’d been aware of his work before but I’d not really paid it much attention. I found them immediately accessible, and quite different from other Renaissance paintings.

Sometimes the paintings actually don’t seem quite right. I’m not talking about the straight portraits, but works like The Seven Acts of Mercy, where it looks as though he’s looked at seven different incidents and then pieced together a picture out of these incidents. So there’s no kind of logic to it in a realist way – it’s not pretending to be a scene that you would actually see. In it two grown-up cherubs seem to be flying sideways. Initially you wonder what they’re doing there because they seem very awkward. But when you twist your head you see they’re obviously having sex. It’s quite an extraordinary piece of painting in its own right within the full painting. I was quite excited and very surprised when I first saw that. It seemed very radical. I remember thinking that he must’ve enjoyed himself when he was making his work.

Polly Morgan – Taxidermist and artist

What I can see in a Caravaggio painting is as important as what is hidden. I might painstakingly spend months making something, only to light it in such a way that large parts of it are in shadow. Shadows need light to exist and what I love about Caravaggio’s paintings are that the less he reveals, the more tactile and sculptural his figures become. I could compare it to pornography; show everything and it doesn’t work, allude to something and it’s compelling.

In Sleeping Cupid, there is a weight to Cupid’s body that is absent in most depictions of him mid-flight. Here he looks spent. When I made my work To Every Seed his own Body, a blue tit collapsed on a miniature prayer book, I wanted to convey a sense of heaviness and fatigue through it’s posture.

Caravaggio’s elevation of the mundane and degenerate is what makes him unique for his time. He succeeds in bringing beauty to subjects that are commonly dismissed. This is something I’ve attempted in works where I’ve taken creatures that are typically considered vermin and shaped them in appealing ways. To have your take on beauty challenged is reinvigorating.

Polly Morgan’s latest show, Psychopomps, is at Haunch of Venison, London W1, until 25 September.

Isaac Julien – Artist and film-maker

When I first saw Caravaggio’s paintings in Rome I remember having what people call an art sickness. I was so in awe of the work, its aura and mastery – it was like a rapture. Bacon’s works have this same kind of aura but it seems to be something that’s missing a bit from contemporary art, which has other aims, other questions to pose.

I’ve always been interested in the use of lighting in Caravaggio’s work. In the 80s I assistant-directed a film called Dreaming Rivers which we lit entirely by candlelight, a specific reference to Caravaggio’s lighting. I even went with the cinematographer to look at some Caravaggios. I’m struck by the way his paintings use the architecture of light, its plasticity, how it forms the body, and I’ve borrowed that in several of my works. These things have been so astutely articulated in Caravaggio’s works that they’re almost, in a prophetic sense, cinematic. Making my documentary about Derek Jarman with Tilda Swinton I also saw this deliberate relationship [to Caravaggio's work] being made in Jarman’s films, where basically there’s an abandoning of sets as such. Instead he works with light and dark.

One work I find striking is The Denial of St Peter. It’s a very troubling scene with such accusatory positioning. It’s really about how things are communicated through the intensity of the gazes. But it’s also the portions, the framing, the lighting, the colour, all of those aspects of communicating this particular moment. It’s so cinematic.

Tom Hunter – Photographer and artist

For me, Caravaggio set the stage for what every contemporary artist seems to be striving for – to live an authentic life and then to talk about, to depict, that experience. Take Tracey Emin, sewing the names of everyone she slept with in a tent, or photographers like Nan Goldin and Sally Mann – their work is all about their own lives. You initially think all of Caravaggio’s paintings are about God and religion but they’re not, they’re actually about his life and the times around him. They are living histories – that’s why his work is so powerful for me.

There’s a Caravaggio painting at the National Gallery called The Beheading of St John the Baptist, which I’ve returned to again and again. In it John the Baptist is on the floor; he has just been killed and Caravaggio gets the atmosphere totally right. Caravaggio was involved in a sword fight, and he actually killed someone: that’s what seems to be recreated here, and that’s why the morbid gravitas of that situation really comes out of the painting.

Caravaggio is like the opposite of the rich and famous fashion photographer of today, who would only be photographing Kate Moss. He was one of the first people to look at the ordinary people and tell their stories and that was really inspiring for me. In my series Living in Hell and Other Stories [shown at the National Gallery, 2005-2006] I wanted to talk about the everyday life around Hackney. I found a headline in the local paper about a woman being attacked in front of her children outside her council flat, which I depicted in Halloween Horror, a translation of Caravaggio’s The Beheading of St John the Baptist. I wanted to record that horrific scene so it wasn’t just a disposable headline, so that people would look at it and think, “My god, this isn’t ordinary – a woman being mugged on her doorstep, in one of the richest cities in the world, in this day and age.”

Of course the way he used light has also been an influence on me. The whole thing about photography is the painting of light – when I was taught photography I was told, “You shouldn’t leave that bit too black because there’s no detail there, you shouldn’t have that bit too bright…”, that sort of thing. But in Caravaggio’s work there are amazing light contrasts and your imagination is left to explore the dark areas. His lighting has clearly been used in film too. Take Blade Runner, with its amazingly lit scenes, dark areas and beams of light through long corridors – that all seems to come from Caravaggio.

Anthony Browne, the children’s laureate, is sitting in his Canterbury garden turning my doodled squiggle into a horse’s head. This is the shape game and, at 63, he’s been playing it for as long as he can remember. The rules are simple: “The first player draws any abstract shape at random,” Browne says. “The second looks at it and then transforms it into something recognisable.” Now he’s invited artists, authors and actors including Philip Pullman, Harry Hill, Ian McEwan and Emma Thompson to play, and has collected their drawings for an online auction and book in aid of the Rainbow Trust, a charity that supports families who have a child with life-threatening or terminal illness.

Quentin Blake, the first contributor to sign up, says: “I jumped at the chance to get involved. Not only was it huge fun thinking how I’d like to customise Anthony’s shape, but encouraging creativity is something I feel strongly about.”

Browne’s first memory of playing the shape game is, as a six-year-old, drawing a pirate emerging from a shoe. More recently, he says, the game has got him into trouble – when he published Willy the Dreamer, the surrealist story of an imaginative chimp, the shape he started with was a Magritte painting; he was later sued by the artist’s estate.

That, however, was nothing compared to the problems his work got him into in 1983. Best known for his gorilla books, Browne was invited to do a piece for schools TV from inside a gorilla’s cage, but the zoo’s owner wasn’t satisfied with his fee, so scattered rose petals in the cage. Rose petals, Browne later learned, excite gorillas. One sniffed him, then sunk its teeth into his leg. As his jeans turned black with blood, he continued with the piece to camera, “terrified, but too embarrassed to speak up”. The scars have faded, he says, but they used to look like a shark bite.

Browne’s ideas for children’s books don’t start with a story, or a character or image; when he begins sketching it’s “like remembering a dream”. He started his career as a medical illustrator. “It was about accuracy and truth, but not too much of the latter. Each painting had to tell the story of the operation, which was hard because there was blood everywhere. So I had to clean it up, and then, for instance, make the liver look like what we think liver looks like. A bit of fat rolled back would suggest a figure, so I’d emphasise this. It’s fantastic to realise I’ve been playing the game forever.”

We pause for a moment and sip our tea. “I think any time we create something, whether composing with a fraction of a melody or mixing up old stories to make a new one, we’re playing the shape game.” He picks up a felt tip and adds a mane to his sprawling doodle. “Nothing,” he smiles, “comes from nowhere.”

The original artwork from The Shape Game project will be auctioned online from 26 July (childrenslaureate.org.uk). An accompanying book, Play the Shape Game, will be published by Walker Books (£5.99). All money raised will go to the Rainbow Trust (rainbowtrust.org.uk)

Think you can do better?

Anthony Browne and the Rainbow Trust have agreed that one lucky reader of the Observer Magazine can win a signed and strictly one-off print of Quentin Blake’s drawing. Simply complete your design and send it to: The Shape Game, Observer Magazine, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU or email a scan to magazine@observer.co.uk. Entries must be received by Monday 2 August. Don’t waste a moment – all ages and abilities welcome. We regret no entries can be returned. The editor’s decision is final. Visit observer.co.uk/quentinblakecomp for terms and conditions and an entry form

The English painter Frederick Cayley Robinson may be the least-known artist ever to have a show at the National Gallery. His is not a name on people’s lips. Until recently, in fact, not many people wanted to look at his strange and silent paintings, with their highly ordered friezes of spellbound figures, so touched with fin-de-siècle melancholy and yearning. But perhaps the wheel of artistic fortune is about to turn.

If it does, it may well be because Cayley Robinson’s art now appears bizarre to the point of baffling, as opposed to quite easily understood. This does not seem to have been the case in his own day (he was born in 1862) when critics praised his timeless idylls and allegories as if they presented no mysteries whatsoever. You can see why, of course: with their cool clear tones and deliberately positioned figures, each carefully contained in outline, every scene looks perfectly lucid. Yet something odd or irrational always threatens the composure.

Three figures stand on the edge of a lake with a flock of sheep (Pastoral, 1923-4). They clearly represent three generations, as echoed by the three generations of sheep. But the child is staring straight out at you as if she wasn’t in an allegory, the dying sun is casting a neon glare on the water so loud it shatters the silence and one of the sheep is about to bump its nose on the gunmetal surface of the lake. In the distance, a windmill pops up as if this cycle of life was taking place somewhere in the Netherlands.

Two women sit in a bare wintry room with a view of the dark city outside. The window opposite is cheerily lit – as in the bright side of the street. It looks a straightforward homily: women without men, perhaps widows, reduced to seamstressing to keep body and soul together. But the sewing machine on the table is so superbly painted in all its black ungainly force that it upstages everything else. A future in surrealism beckons.

At first it seems as though some of these anomalies are hapless or cack-handed; plenty of effects in art are accidental. But not when one encounters the central works of the show: four vast oil paintings commissioned for the entrance hall of the Middlesex Hospital in London, on the theme of acts of mercy, that are fraught with internal tensions.

Two split-screen panels show a procession of orphans, all sad-eyed and identically dressed in blue and white uniforms, winding their way through the orphanage refectory to receive identical bowls of milk. They could be little nuns – or little nurses – in their starched aprons. Calm, clean, orderly, serene: the ideal vision, the ideal conditions, for a hospital.

But one of the orphans breaks the frame, turning to look directly at the viewer. She is all pensive sadness. Nurses at the Middlesex, exhausted and frightened by the spectacle of death on the wards, have reported identifying with this girl as they passed her in the hall. Another orphan droops her head, disconsolate; those queuing on the staircase could be descending into a tomb, so sepulchral is the room with its massive walls. The panel on the left recalls Leonardo’s The Last Supper in its composition: the panel on the right is filled, so to speak, with emptiness – blank wall, bare table, vacant floor. The quality of mercy appears extremely strained.

How to read the tone of these paintings, made between 1915 and 1920? It gets even harder with the next two pictures, which show the hospital itself from the outside. Here the wounded of the First World War are arranged on the steps in their “convalescent blues” – loathed regulation garments – like figures in a Renaissance fresco, except that they are blank-eyed and listless.

What do they feel, what do they think? All the answers are frustrated. Why is there a grandiose equestrian statue on the right? Who is the emaciated figure in evening dress? No doubt Cayley Robinson has been looking at Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ – which the National Gallery has introduced into the proceedings as if it were a piece of evidence – but that still silent masterpiece offers no clues for anyone trying to enter into the artist’s thinking.

In the strange balance of this painting, as much weight is given to a patient as to his carpet slippers, and each man is cast as a type. It is an enactment, staged, distanced, almost alien in its ascetic clarity: an empty performance of real life.

It has been suggested that the doctor in the final painting is some sort of self-portrait, though I can’t see it myself. He raises his hand in blessing over a bandaged child and her kneeling mother, as if elevated to secular messiah. Is this sardonic or sincere, this vision of a world in which religion has been usurped by medicine? The meaning remains elusive.

But the bug-eyed gargoyle of a dog in that scene undermines the apparent piety of it all, like the self-possessed cat in the middle of the orphanage. The elements of these paintings are always pulling in opposite directions. You could make an atheist or a pacifist out of Cayley Robinson, you could deduce a contempt for doctors who see themselves as gods, for hospitals as grand as palaces, for a system in which patients are dressed like convicts. But you could never say he was putting politics before the patient’s need for visual calm and clarity.

The look of Cayley Robinson’s paintings, so distinctive, so clear, turns out to be much more than a synthesis of past art. It is precisely what allows subversion to hide in plain sight.

It is difficult to look at Howard Hodgkin‘s paintings without a picture in your mind of where they might hang when they are not on loan to an exhibition. They are haunted by secret worlds, not only that of the artist, but also those of his collectors. They are paintings for and of the private sphere. Only one work in his captivating exhibition of recent work at Modern Art Oxford has been lent from a museum. The rest have come from houses and apartments, from over the mantelpiece or the bed, from a dark office or a bright dining room . . . you see? You start thinking about these absent places, the homes of the paintings, and the images keep coming.

Most suggestive of all is Hodgkin’s little painting Leaf (2007-09). It belongs, surely, in a study. I imagine it hanging near the door. The walls around it are crammed with natural history specimens – impaled butterflies, glassed-in stag beetles. Old volumes of Darwin and Linnaeus are on the bookcases. Opposite this painting, in playful juxtaposition, is a microscopically precise 19th-century study of a leaf. Outside, through a window honeyed by the glow of the desk lamp, is an orchard.

Leaf is a perfect miniature of Hodgkin’s art. In this small picture he distills everything that is original about his vision. Who else would do what Hodgkin does here, and mimic the genre of the botanical study, yet enfurl that tradition of scientific looking in a baroque robe of abstract green? His leaf is a double swirl of louche colour, a wild brushstroke enclosed in a battered wooden frame. It is not a realistic leaf yet it responds to the visible world – it is the colour of a leaf. It is, we accept, faithful to reality – but how? How does the world so pervade Hodgkin’s art that each picture, placed in the dry space of an art gallery, seems to carry with it the intimacy of private rooms, the freshness of gardens, the changing light of nature?

Some artists emerge fully-formed, perfect, from art school, like David Hockney in the 1960s, glittering in a gold jacket and pop spectacles, painting with an open sensuality. Hodgkin, born in 1932, also had his first exhibitions in the early 60s but to look at his early works, to read the reviews of a shared show at the ICA in 1962 with the – then – far more happening Allen Jones, is to excavate a stuttering, uncertain start. The scion of a famous family, an Eton drop-out, he did not look in his first decade of painting like a central figure in the art of his time. Yet I would argue that alone of all his British contemporaries he has remained loyal to the most interesting and serious artistic insights of the 60s. He is conventionally praised, and occasionally dismissed, as the last English romantic, a pure painter in the mould of Constable and Turner, an artist who feels. I see him more as an artist who thinks – a philosophical painter.

To return to that leaf in Oxford. Hodgkin could have dipped his brush in any colour he liked. He mixed a lime or olive-tinged green, that breaks into streaks of yellow against the bare wooden board, leaving oil stains around it and a clogged sticky pool against the frame. It is also, magically, leaf shaped. This single wide brushstroke, doubled up on itself in a bulbous curve, produces the tapering form of a laurel leaf. Then again, the wispy delicacy of the brushstroke – so casual, so light, so airy – suggests a leaf’s movement in the air, as if it were about to be blown away on an evening breeze. So he gives us the colour of a leaf, the shape of a leaf: and most importantly, the essence of a leaf, which comes of its slightness, its vulnerability to gusts.

This is a systematic, and to me profoundly moving, rethinking of what it is to see an object. Ideas, associations, affinities, memories, longings consitute, for Hodgkin, our real experience of the material world. When we think of a leaf we may have different memories from his, but we never simply see a constellation of cells. The world comes to us already composed of lyrical suggestions. The most ambitious modern artists have wrestled with this complex web of experience ever since Paul Cézanne stared at Mont Sainte-Victoire and, portraying it again and again, infused every rock, every pine branch with his own isolation and turbulent inwardness. In the 1950s and early 60s the inquiry begun by Cézanne was reformulated by three Americans – Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly – and I believe these are the artists of that epochal time with whom we should compare Hodgkin.

When Johns made an American flag of collaged newsprint embalmed in encaustic, he conveyed the plenitude of stories and perspectives an apparently simple icon could hold; when Rauschenberg put his bed, smeared and spattered with paint, on a gallery wall he invited the beholder to read or invent tales of sex and intimacy in its stains. But most of all Hodgkin resembles Twombly, whose graffiti epics speak of dirty sex and high feeling in grand palatial Roman settings. Like Twombly, he has become better as he has become more openly emotional. It was with paintings of the 1980s whose titles, such as In Bed in Venice (1984-8), or Love Letter (1984-88), convey their intimacy, that Hodgkin discovered the eloquent grandeur of his maturity. Neither of these pictures is legible in a realist way: but neither is emptily abstract, either. To engage with them is to be caught in knots and shocks of recognition and imagining: to chase after the artist’s encounters and longings. It is in the best intellectual tradition of modern art from Cézanne to Rauschenberg’s Bed and Twombly’s Ferragosto.

His exhibition of recent work in Oxford reveals that he is still advancing, and still thinking. Lawn (2009), seems to want to show all the potential colours of grass in different lights, at different seasons, or in the varying vitality of different blades in a single bit of turf, within one unified smear of layered colours. Khaki, yellow, pink, grey, pine and moss all twist together in lines of unmixed oil, like a preparation for a giant microscope. At the very beginning of natural history in art stands Albrecht Dürer’s 1503 watercolour The Great Piece of Turf. In this mesmerising observation of nature Dürer concentrates his gaze on a tiny section of the world and depicts each blade of grass, each leaf and seed in it with intense accuracy. Hodgkin similarly excavates a cross-section of grass but we have no way of knowing if he has portrayed an entire lawn, or a two-centimetre patch. His painting Big Lawn (2008-10) is broader, as if seen from further away in the soft light of a summer evening, and Sky (2008-09) induces a moment of vertigo just with two alternating blues – dark and light – conveying, in a small golden oval frame, the height and sweep of a Tiepolo heaven. Yet at the same time, and this complicates the show in dark ways, contemporary history intrudes.

Yellow Sky (2010) reveals just a sliver of yellow horizon under an oily mass of brown and black clouds, with towering and falling pillars of paint on the left of the scene that resemble the funnel of a tornado sweeping across America (I imagine), while Dirty Weather (2001) concentrates a terrible storm, or a volcano, or a battlefeild into a miasma of ochre and green and black smoke: it suggests looking through veiled eyes at a dustcloud after an explosion in a nature reserve. But Shadow (2002-03) leaves less room for doubt. Across a bright corn-yellow world towers a black column. It is clearly the shadow of the attacks in New York on 11 September 2001. That shadow streaks across this entire exhibition.

Whatever personal pain is communicated by the exhibition’s extraordinary climactic painting, Blood, the violence of this new work (too new to be in the catalogue) is also unmistakably historical. Over a green world, a great sweep of blood gushes up and then arcs and falls – a wave of red, congealing into brown scabs, turning the earth into wet flesh. It is gut-churning. Never has the wetness of his paint seemed so apposite. Part of the seduction of his art is that the colours never seem to dry: the oil keeps its freshness. The wide motions of the brush create a sense of openness and fluency that doesn’t stabilise into neat lines, doesn’t settle down. But here, in his widescreen epic of war, he turns that vivacity to horror. We seem to be seeing people bleed. The red explodes from severed arteries. It dries on the road. It waters the fields. It is sucked into transparent tubes and mingles with water in a jar.

The sense of green places and blue waters in these paintings of the past 10 years is surely apposite to an age of planetary dread. Like a television documentary about the state of the Earth, but with the authority of paint, his transfigured landscapes and still lifes tell of a nature that is not safe, a life no longer guaranteed, for him or anyone else. Hodgkin is never quite what you think. The giddy colourist is really a daring philosopher, the intimist a public man after all. In the 60s he might have seemed a bit conventional compared with the pop artists but in reality he was thinking his way into a deeply ambitious form of abstract storytelling. The sense of history that shakes his recent paintings has deep roots in his art. In the 80s he collaborated with Susan Sontag on their illustrated story of Aids and its impact, The Way We Live Now. That political, engaged stance was entirely of a piece with his paintings of the time, whose tales of private life – as in for example Lovers (1984-92) – testify to the significance, even the historical weight, of what happens in bed. He still thinks about that. One of the most intense paintings here is a burst of black and red and fire-orange called Privacy and Self-Expression in the Bedroom (2004-06).

What has mattered in Hodgkin’s art, and still does, is not simply a brilliant way with colour, although it would be hard to find many painters of the past 100 years who could out-scintillate a work such as that bedroom picture, with its chromatic suggestion of coals glowing in a blackened grate. It is the depth and truthfulness of his meditation on the way we translate experience, even as it happens, into embers of memory. If this strikes you as a whimsical project then you must also dismiss Cézanne and Proust.

Howard Hodgkin: Time and Place 2001-2010 is at Modern Art Oxford, until 5 September. For information call 01865 722733. www.modernartoxford.org.uk

Harrison Krix (a.k.a Volpin) has taken 17 months to make a helmet replica that is used by Daft Punk member Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo.

Additional Credits
Helmet code programming by James Moss.
Chroming by Creations n’ Chrome
Custom PCBs printed by batchPCB.com (designed by Harrison Krix)
Visor vacuum-forming performed by Mike Iverson
Some video and photography courtesy of Emily Krix

Photo courtesy of Jennifer Barclay

Daft Punk performing at Wireless Festival 2007. From left: Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo. Photo © Fabio Venni.

Link via What the Cool

There are groups of people that focus on urban knitting such as Yarn Bombing DIY, Urban Knitting and Guerilla Knitting. Their art form is kind of like graffiti but instead of spray cans these use yarn and sewing materials. The knitters mark trees, street polls, and other objects in a bright and colorful manner.


Top: Viva La Gong knit tree by grrl+dog

Arnolfini toadstool yarnbomb by yo! hanna

Pom Pom Bomb by Easymakesmehappy

Eastney – 1st Yarnbomb with Twm in knitted collar by Claire Sambrook

Yarn bombing by yo! hanna

Denise Litchfield installing by grrl+dog

Knit the City – Phonebox other side by Deadly Knitshade

Rabbit ears and easter basket by Buelow

Link via My Modern Met