Howard Hodgkin makes a bigger splash

Entry to Sir Howard Hodgkin's studio, a mighty Victorian affair in Bloomsbury, is via an iron bridge from the Georgian house he has occupied for the past 30 years. En route, the visitor passes an immense palm tree and a flourishing cluster of big-leaved oriental plants. It is all very peaceful and exotic. But once inside the studio, the experience is one of being ambushed — from the walls, where, stretching to a width of 20ft each, are the two largest prints the artist has ever made.

They are also the most intensely dramatic. Each five-sheet piece is spattered with startling colours, one with a thick red border, the other blue. Hodgkin seems to have hurled scarlet, crimson, orange, green and blue in a frenzy of dynamic activity. They explode on the paper, splashing out in every direction and dribbling freely down towards the floor. Even Hodgkin himself looks overawed as he joins me in the studio. "I really don't know what I think of them yet — they keep taking me by surprise," he admits.

Throughout a long career, Hodgkin has thrived on an exceptional ability to renew himself. Ever since his first London solo show in 1962 he has been inspired by potent memories of people, landscapes, cities, love affairs and a host of other, more private and erotic concerns. "I paint representational pictures of emotional situations," he has said.

He gives his paintings witty titles, such as Haven't We Met? Of Course We Have, which sharpen our involvement with his world. French art, and in particular the sensuous paintings of Matisse and Bonnard, lie behind much of his colour-saturated work. But he has also been fascinated by Indian painting and paid many visits to India while building up his own distinguished collection of Indian art.

Hodgkin is an outstanding British painter and in 1984 he represented his country at the Venice Biennale. The following year he won the Turner Prize, memorably exhibiting at the Tate an intense and fiery painting called A Small Thing But My Own.

Since then, his work, which has sometimes been just a few inches square, has gradually grown much larger, and he now makes prints as well as paintings. But the powerful new prints on view in his studio are a mixture of techniques: hand-painting, etching and then embossing to produce the thicker textures. As a result, they are charged with the same dynamism as Hodgkin's most spectacular paintings.

This eruptive vitality becomes even more admirable once I hear how ill the 77-year-old artist has been. Walking carefully towards a chair, and leaning on the proferred arm of his partner, Antony Peattie, a music critic, he explains that he has "been suffering from hydrocephalus, or water on the brain. I couldn't think well or sleep well."

Over the past eight months he has undergone two operations, and although considerably better, he still needs a great deal of rest. "It was very frustrating lying in a hospital bed and wanting to go to work," he says.

Hodgkin obviously relishes his studio. As we talk, the sun suddenly floods the lofty glass roof above us with luminosity. In Victorian times, this remarkable building was used by a dairy, and horses with milk carts would enter and move around on a turntable. Far larger than most artists' studios, its space and light must be a perpetual inspiration to Hodgkin. "I now hardly walk at all outside, but in here I'm very aware of the elements. I also have a house in the middle of France and I paint there as well. I'm very affected by my surroundings."

Why did he decide to produce these huge, bright prints while suffering from such a serious illness? Were they, I wonder, an act of defiance? "They could be," he admits, "but I don't think anything is ever so simple." He then concedes in a quiet, melancholy voice that "transience is something very hard to deal with".