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| John Hoyland |
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Real Art cannot be grasped, learned or understood quickly. Real art evades easy description discourages amusing anecdotes, confronts glamour and camp with a stony, unblinking eye, and is not welcome in colour supplement land. John Hoyland, 'An Introduction to an Exhibition', Hayward Annual, Hayward Gallery, 1982. Visiting John Hoyland's 'loft' apartment one is struck by the number of masks and other tribal pieces, notably a free - standing African burial stick figure, a reminder of how much he has roamed the more exotic parts of the world in recent years. There are also several examples of his own work, not least a selection of his glazed ceramic vessels and sculptures in exotic colours and shapes; and between the windows, the antitheses of this black magic, the portrait he painted of his Dad nearly 50 years ago. It is an excellent and affectionate tonal study. Outside the bathroom there is further proof of the strength of that filial bond, an etching of him helping his old man back from the boozer. Hoyland belongs to a generation for whom art was a craft to be learned. His training tool 15 years, from junior art school at 11 in 1945 to his graduation from the Royal Academy Schools in 1960. He had a thorough grounding in applied art techniques; above all he had to endure the drudgery - he hated it - of drawing: anatomy, geometric and still-life arrangements, the antique cast and finally the live and, this being puritanical England, totally unfanciable nude model. He could easily have been a distinguished academician as a figurative painter but in his first year at the Royal Academy Schools the abstract expressionists were shown at the Tate and he and his generation were overwhelmed. As overwhelmed as an earlier generation had been by the Picasso/Matisse show at the V&A, and an earlier one still by the French post - impressionist show at the Grafton Galleries before World War 1. Abstract expressionism looked giant and heroic. The choice it forced was obvious. He could either make a comfortable living 'painting debutantes' eyelashes or shiny horses' arses, which was always a sure fire thing. Or get involved in the revolution of '20th century art'. Hoyland joined the revolution. He has been at the cutting edge ever since. The excitement was not just releasing colour from the strait-jacket of depiction, so that a green could exist on its own terms without having to represent an apple. That was something which had been around in art since the end of the 19th century, although not to the radiant extent of a Rothko or Still, a Newman and Hofmann. Even more challenging was the end of the domestic tyranny of the easel. That was a total break with the past. Artists could abandon their smocks and berets and let rip in jeans and boots like house - painters daubing a wall or slapping - up wall - paper. The floor became the arena, the artist became Action Man. This process was further galvanised in 1964 by the invention of acrylic paint. The quick - drying properties of this new water - based medium opened the flood - gates to post - Pollock stainers and pourers. Acrylic was to painting what the electric guitar was to music. No master of the first wave of acrylic specialists used it more radiantly than Hoyland, as the 1960s work in his 1999 retrospective at the Royal Academy so powerfully demonstrated. Paintings to knock your socks off through sheer force of colour, none more so than that crimson masterpiece 28 - 2 - 69, the equivalent of wall - to - wall sound. His friend and fellow spirit among English artists at this time was Anthony Caro, who had applied the lessons of New York painting to sculpture. Hoyland's early colour panoramas used the wall in the same expansive way as Caro used painted steel and the floor in a breathtaking piece like Prairie. Caro and Hoyland have been brothers in arms ever since, taking abstraction to an extreme where figuration once more enters the equation. At the Academy Paul Moorhouse categorised Hoyland's evolution as construction, expression and imagination. It could also be described as a passage from the cerebral to the instinctual; or the minimal to the maximal. Above all these days he lets nature take its course as far as he coherently can - a matter of deft timing. One thing is certain, he has mastered his preoccupation but always moved on; always testing himself from painting to painting. How rare that is, especially of someone of his achievement. Most artists are happy enough to forge a style and then turn it into a trademark; only the few defy the conservative expectations of their public and blaze new trails. Hoyland is an exemplary case. His paintings today are more ambitious and reactionary, in the non-political sense, than when he was a young Turk of 26. Most artists would also be happy to perfect just one of the myriad techniques he employs with such mastery, working canvas on the floor, tipping the flows this way and that or scattering colour like seed while walking a solid builders plank suspended over the canvas on breeze - blocks. Iridescence is a major component in this recent work. Radiance has always been a big thing with him since he saw Turner watercolours in Sheffield's municipal Art Gallery as a boy. Iridescent acrylic enabled him to push this further by introducing a quality of light suggestive of fathomless depth and exploiting galaxies no other paint or painter can match. It is ever present in the work at the Beaux Arts, a lit contrast to matt oppositions or obstructions; opening suggestions of yawning space in contrast to measured bars of poured paint, as in the many - layered ambiguity of 1000 fires. Travel has contributed to this exoticism and complexity. Ever since Delacroix went to Morocco colourists have visited the tropic world for inspiration. Hoyland is the latest in this line. In his youth his biggest buzz was going to Manhattan, now it is Thupelo in the South African bush, Bali, Jamaica, Haiti, last year Mauritius. 'Everything you see is hyper intense. I mean what am I going t get looking out here?' He says indicating the view of prosaic office - blocks from his studio window, 'Snowblind?' Hoyland's art is an exception to the notorious lack of light there is in most English painting. 'I lust for the tropics, for the intensity of light, the intensity of life actually. You always feel life is less valuable. People take the kind of risks every day we wouldn't think of taking in the western world - the kind of cars they drive, the busses they ride, the roads they use. It's life on the edge. People are always hustling, trying to get an angle on you.' The new work is electric with this awareness. Often there is a combination of marks which register as a figure - ambiguously, just as a shadow might or a stain on a wall. Sometimes this is declared in the title: The Visitor; Presence Suspected; Man; Jump. But no sooner made than the association dissolves into colour, pure and simple - blue marginalizing red; green animating red; red enlivening orange; yellow like lightning. Hoyland fills notebooks with ideas on his travels, sketches of things seen - a gnarled tree, sun-bathers dotted about a beach - or imaginary paintings, all done in bright colours with marker pens. 'The last thing I want to be is an illustrational painter. I want drama but I don't want melodrama. It's a question of how far can you push it without getting into illustrational melodrama.' He also dreams up titles, which he may use later - the chosen title always applied after he has finished the painting. Titles indicate the work's spirit, however literally descriptive they may seem: Swimming with Snakes; Garlands of Fireflies; Jaqmel Haiti. It can take days to finish a work, the title's single date referring to the moment of completion; although the impression is always of spontaneity, of the whole shebang brought to an astonishing and immediate resolution, like the elaborate trick of a conjuror. Hoyland says he covers mistakes but, when he does, it is indiscernible; however he welcomes 'accidents'. There are wonderful examples - spawning shoals of silver, mists of throbbing colour interaction but never any fussing over details; something William Scott deplored in English painting and warned him against. And there is no agonising, no puritanical desire to make a meal of the effort, in the manner of the tortured followers of Bomberg: 'You look at a Derain or a Matisse. Of course, they had their scraping - down times and their throwing work away. But a lot of it is just bomp - bomp - bomp - bomp - boom'. Hoyland is a fauvist whose visual language has been enriched by a world revealed through technologies beyond the wildest dreams of fauvism's pioneers; but he remains true to the spirit of bomp - bomp - boom. Even on a small scale, when the thick paint is moulded into relief, there is never a suggestion of second best. The small paintings have their own obdurate and independent place in his oeuvre, their scale monumental. Hoyland's belief in the humanity implicit in craft remains unmoved by conceptual conceits of the pompous declaration that anything can be art. He concluded a recent letter to the TLS, written in support of Tom Stoppard's Academy speech deploring ironic distance and the abnegation of mastery inherent in High Art: 'By merely painting an idea, or having an idea painted, the central act of creativity is removed, that is, the things that one discovers in the physical process of making the work, together with the intuitive decisions made along the way, and, of course, a bit of luck.' John Hoyland is our bit of luck. John McEwan Art critic for The Sunday Telegraph and co-author with Bryan Robertson of the catalogue 'John Hoyland, Paintings 1967 - 1979' at The Serpentine Gallery, 1979 |
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 1934 1946-51 1951-56 1956 1956-60 1957 1958 1959 1960 1960-61 1961-65 1961-62 1963 1964 1964-65 1967-69 1968 1969 1969-73 1970 1973 1974-77 1974-89 1975-79 1979 1979-80 1980 1982 1983 1984-85 1986 1987 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 One Man Exhibitions 1964 1965 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1976-77 1978 1979 1979-80 1980 1981 1982 1983 1983-84 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1990 1991 1992 1994 1995 1996 1999 2000 2001 Two Man Exhibitions 1969 1972 1977 1978 1981 |
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