After attending the Slade School of Fine Art in the immediate post-war years, Joan Hodes (b.1925) spent a year in Paris at the Academie Julien and the Grand Chaumière. At these places she first developed her abiding interest in drawing. Her most important mentor during this period, from 1947 until 1953, was Oskar Kokoschka, who accepted her as one of the small number of pupils he was teaching at the time. Later influences on her work have been the Scottish artists Joan Eardly, Anne Redpath and John Huston.

Over a long and continuing career Hodes has concentrated on landscape. She mostly works on the spot at sites she knows well in Suffolk, Ireland and Scotland. Repeated depictions of the same views have imbued her work with an insightful understanding of these particular landscapes. Hodes uses a variety of different media, including pastel, chalk, charcoal, watercolour and pen and ink, often in the same work.