Artist Statement: I've always found it difficult to distinguish between a painting and a drawing. I’m drawn to making paintings that use marks in an instinctive, spontaneous way, allowing a brush to go into free fall across the surface of the canvas. Equally, I make drawings that use immediate, expressive marks – a rapid, effortless process that can sometimes only take a few minutes to complete. The media or surfaces the drawings are made on is largely immaterial. What counts is the energy that is apparent in these gestural works – the sense of a line taking itself for a walk (to use Klee’s famous phrase) and the emotional direction this may lead you in.

Indigo voyager, you lift above green, travel in horizontal time, with silent messages. Deep green grows behind you, smudged over a paler green. The gaps between are soothing, not anxious, as ideas seem to float past. Emissary (2025), like many of Nicky Hodges’ paintings is quiet, but it is not easy. It has activity within the quietude; a thinking mind behind a calm face. And don’t we seek both – the beauty and tranquillity of abstraction that frees us from the tyranny of representation, and yet also the sense that something is yearning to be represented at the edge of the image – or no – from within it.