After a visit to the artist's studio, John-Paul Stonard muses on several recent works by Howard Hodgkin.

Considering the painting The Sea, Goa (2013), Stonard writes: "Measuring barely a foot across, it seems at first glance to consist of nothing more than three horizontal stripes of scarlet red and cobalt blue, stacked at the bottom of the panel, in landscape orientation… The picture recalls an experience, someone close to Hodgkin told me, of sitting last year on a terrace looking out onto the beach at Goa as the sun set… It stops you in your tracks to see the precision and economy with which the experience has been translated into a combination of coloured pigments, suspended in oil, brushed in three gestures onto an old piece of wood… Like many of Hodgkin’s works The Sea, Goa is a relic of a moment."