[7] Her early work, a series of pastel drawings and watercolours, owed a lot to Kokoschka's teaching, but later influences included Scottish artists Joan Eardley, Anne Redpath and John Huston.
Hodes' many sketchbooks revealed her desire to make studies en plein air in order to capture the unpredictable conditions of her favourite places: the windswept coasts of Suffolk and the mountains of Ireland, Wales, and the Mediterranean.
[2] During the 1950s, Hodes continued to work, but, with limited time to paint while she raised her family, she produced a series of pastel drawings and watercolour compositions of her children using strong, contrasting colours that had an intimacy without sentimentalising their subject.
[9] In the 1960s, as her family grew older, Hodes taught art in secondary and adult education and began to work in oil, concentrating on landscape, mostly in locations she knew well in Britain and Europe.
Arts Review critiqued the show, saying that she caught the sudden showers that come in the summer where sunlight glistens through rain, heightening rather than diminishing the intensity of colour, which suited the free impressionistic style of her work.
[13] In a group exhibition at the Phoenix Gallery in Suffolk in 1987, described as a "lavish display of hedonism and intellect", Hodes was singled out for her work, which was described as "singing colour, with brushwork to match, somewhat akin to the idyllic visions of Bonnard".
[17] The artists' group was made up of John Barker, Joan Hodes, Heather Hodgson, Ali Hollingsworth, Martin Laurance, and Katharine Roney and they spent over a year sketching and painting on what locals' call 'The Island', although it is connected to the mainland at Aldeburgh, where an exhibition was held in November 2009.
Practising all forms of etching: drypoint, monoprint, intaglio, photo-etching, hard and soft grounds, and pure aquatint, the group started with house exhibitions before progressing to annual shows in local galleries.
[20][21][22] Group shows included the Contemporary Portrait Society, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Leicester, Mercury, and Ben Uri Galleries, the Hampstead Artists Council, and the Women's International Art Club (WIAC).