Over the past two decades Howard Hodgkin has experimented with printmaking, combining hand-colouring with lift-ground aquatint and carborundum.  Using a range of different grains of resin in the aquatint grounds, from fine to very coarse, has varied the texture of areas of his prints.  Hodgkin exploited these various techniques with particular intensity in his large 1995 prints the ‘Venetian Views’, deemed Hodgkin’s most ambitious and elaborate print project. Venice, Afternoon is one of four prints Hodgkin worked on, each work was printed from the same five plates, but they changed in appearance and mood due to variations in the ink colours used with the plates and the differences in hues and imagery in the hand-coloured plates.  Venice, Afternoon, along with Venice, Morning and Venice, Evening is printed on sixteen sheets of paper, aligned in rows of four, as if to evoke the huge multiple sheet woodcuts of bird’s eye views of Venice published in the Renaissance. In their richly worked surface the ‘Venetian Views’ assume the same weight as his paintings, with the intricate interplay between printed and painted marks.

Hodgkin’s fascination with large travel posters, seen in the metro in Paris in the late 1950s and early 1960s, is expressed in a series of four large intaglio prints made with carborundum between 1990 and 1991 that include Flowering Palm and Night Palm. The sense of immediacy, spontaneity and directness of the Palm series achieves a similar aesthetic to the posters, with their simple forms, large size, bright hues and straightforward nature.  These large Parisian posters were the only kind of print Hodgkin ever consciously tried to imitate.