Henry Bell Kimborough Hudson sometimes drags his drawings and paintings, tied to a bike, around the streets of East London and can often be found staining them with tea. Recently Hudson, whose work is bound up in Britishness and being British, turned his back on oil paint in favour of plasticine, and this week an exhibition of new 'plasticine paintings' will go on view at Hiscox Art Projects in London.
Last year I was invited to a show of Henry Hudson's in London Fields and thought 'am I really going to travel all that way to look at an exhibition of plasticine paintings because they will be childish and the person who has made them will be annoying'. But I did go and stood corrected. There's an odd, almost perverse lushness to what inhabits Hudson's canvases that make them look more like oil paintings than oil paintings themselves. There's a nod to Beckmann, a nod to Kippenberger, an unmistakeable sense of enquiry and a graveness of subject matter that would silence any detractor.
When he was a student at St Martin's, Hudson got into collage and found stuff, as one is perhaps prone to when one is young. That residue of youth, though, now seems to have departed. Occasionally you may find a packet of fags and a bottle of cheap cider painted hyper-realistically next to a delicately rendered owl but somehow it's a combination that works. A story of a life, no matter how surreal, can be read in any one of his paintings or drawings. A life lived well or badly - it's all there and it's all very human. Even the drawing of a theatrical toad, striding in a stately manner, cutting through his day like a razor, heading stage left, is saying something about being human. It's the capturing, I think, of the essence of cruelty or pride, of the vulnerability that accompanies folly, that enliven the mind's eye. You can't help but want to look in to the eyes of the madly brutal '1950s Paedophile,' even though you see there his putrid intention to damage, even though you feel uncomfortable when you look, and close to tears. To find that tipping point, to throw you off, is quite a feat for a painter. Humour and horror is here, ladelled on in equal measure.
Henry Hudson's practice involves heating different coloured plasticine, then mixing it in the palm of his hand before transferring it, with his fingers, onto canvases of cross-etched plywood. Out of such child's play, such innocence and gloopiness comes the very opposite of childishness. 'Love Is Blind: What She Has Too Much Of, He Has Too Little' is dominated by the contented stare of a very big busty woman sitting on Van Gogh's Chair. The plasticine works especially well when appropriating the brush strokes of a mad Dutch genius. The big girl's husband is perched on her knee, his tiny-tot legs don't reach the floor; he's half her size at most and could, in looks at least, be Stephen Spender. (This 1950s thing keeps sneaking in; did Hudson have a past life, where he put on a threadbare waistcoat every morning, in the half-light, to go down the pit?)
What stays with you in this painting, for my money the most accomplished of the current set, is the Hogarth-like sense of satisfaction, if not joy, that emanates from a scene that's also a little bit grotesque. There has got to be something unspeakable going on behind closed doors - you can tell by the couples' eyes that someone's losing out, somewhere; but they're not riddled with guilt and they're far from joyless. It makes me want to know how by painting an eye, by representing the language of the body, in a certain way so much can be communicated.
Hudson's most recent body of work, 'Dewlap', takes its collective title from that redundant, melancholic and pendulous mass of skin, the dewlap, that can be found on an elderly person's neck. Like the wattle of a bird, it serves no purpose but to hang around and be laughed at. The title, with its sense of the ridiculous punctured by sadness, came to Hudson last Christmas, while having a cup of tea with his grand-dad in his hometown of Wick in Worcesteshire.
Most of Hudson's Biro drawings stick with the Britishness thing. The figures in them are often lifted directly from newspapers, from Country Life or Farmers' Weekly, from dusty books and periodicals, from Ol' Blighty being herself, undiluted, and they seem to be saying a great deal about our ideals, about our obsession with class and our tea-time spreads of toast-racks and crumpets. Though figurative, they are nearly always distorted and frequently troubling. A girl shouts as a moody bird lands on her head and refuses to move. She's a little girl, stunted in height, but she's also an old lady who looks like she's just about had it with the world. She's a film-still from a nightmare actually; really, really pissed off. Then there's a soldier, dead behind the eyes, who's decided to dress his bulldog up in a soldier's hat, there's a bunch of asparagus, there's a dodgy looking chav slatting us the Vs. Most of them draw you in with a random flash of colour that luxuriates on its own background but, essentially, the intricacy of the drawing, the starkness of the black pen on the white background and the depth of field are enough to keep you with them.
Henry Hudson graduated from Central St Martin's College of Art and Design in 2005. His first exhibition at Hiscox Art Projects was 'The Beautiful and the Damned', a controversial collaboration with Stella Vine, which featured celebrities including Kate Moss and Meg Matthews. 'Dewlap' opens on 22 February at Hiscox Art Projects, behind the Gherkin building, near Liverpool Street.
Henry Hudson: Dewlap
22 February - 20 April
Hiscox Art Projects
1 Great St Helen's
London EC3A 6HX
T. +44 (0)20 7448 6000
www.hiscox.com
Laura K Jones
Laura K Jones is a London-based journalist and a regular news correspondent for Your Gallery magazine.
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