James Hovis Hodges Quotes

When I started working with mirrors, it seemed to be the perfect material to stand in for that waiting.

As a viewer, my own work elicits strong emotional reaction from me.

But most people don’t come up to me and express a lot of emotion.

Color is an intense experience on its own.

Color is for me the purest form of expression, the purest abstract reality.

For a while, I thought a lot about lineage. Where do I belong? Who am I standing next to?

However, some of my work is very subtle, and one should expect very subtle reactions to it.

I move very slowly. It’s usually material first. I sit with the material for a long time.

I think that some works are more accessible than others.

I think young people have a wonderful reaction to color because it’s not screwed up by too many references.

I was feeling a strong need to change, grow, and break with particular things that were going on in my life and my history, and the material was the perfect answer for that.

I was trying to write an autobiography using prints and patterns that reference emotional, psychological, and personal development in my work, as a person growing up, figuring out who I was. I used fabrics to stand in for occurrences.

I wasn’t interested in holding onto the evidence of things.

I work from a personal place, and the work has personal meaning for me.

It’s as if I were collaborating with myself, revealing my relationship to the material. My hand would make the drawing. Then my mouth would transmit it.

Landscape is a piece that is emotional and psychological.

My latest works are these things with light bulbs.

Often, I work out of my work. One work takes me to the next thing.