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| John Hoyland |
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"FULL OF BLOODY LIFE, YOU OLD BUGGER"! The floor of John Hoyland 's studio resembles a jungle undergrowth after a storm - a wonder of wild colour, fertility and iridiscence, nothing still, nothing quiet, every casuality somehow turned to aesthetic advantage. It is sticky enough for me to fancy that if I walk with purpose on it I might be able to take a couple of his paintings home on my shoes. As the least conceptual or ornamental of painters, John Hoyland wouldn 't mind that. Since he paints with the whole man, and aspires to paint everything, it 's with every part of yourself that you feel you should possess him. As with his paintings, so with the atmosphere in which he works: what strikes you immediately is the fecundity. Not only the masks and other tribal artefacts picked up on his travels, but the outlandish glass and ceramic sculptures he has made himself, great phallic excrescences which dominate his dining furniture, taking the place of dinner guests - actually excluding dinner guests, since there isn 't room at the table for sculptures and people - hinting at an impatience with the conventional niceties, not out of some impulse to primitive slumming (for he is definitely a man of now), but as though he cannot bear to be in only one place or inhabit only one dimension at a time. The restlessness of the man is tangible. "All my stuff comes out of going to the tropics," he tells me, as though, treading the jungle floor of his studio, one needs to have that pointed out. "Something about the abundance of life there - the danger, the music, the light. I can 't get going here." There and here. Though he does not come across as fraught or anxious, there is no missing the tension in him between where he is and where he would rather be. The work vibrates with somewhere else. He reels off the places he has lived - Bali, Australia, the Caribbean, Haiti, Mauritius, Thupelo in the South African bush, Amsterdam, New York. The notebooks commemorating these sojourns - pictorial diaries, aides-memoire, sketches made with oily markers at the moment of seeing and being struck - are exquisite. Quick and intense, witty, angry, rhapsodic, page after page of Matisse-like absorptions in the light and colour of the natural world, but romantically footloose as well, in the spirit of Gauguin. It isn 't strictly true that he can 't get going here: the work he continues to produce, without the slightest diminution of energy or invention, and without any concession to more modest or manageable scale, attests to how much getting going he remains capable of. But there is something illusory about his place of work. He isn 't painting where he is. Sometimes he will draw inspiration for a painting directly from his notebooks, but often it is simply as though his imagination is saturated with that tropical abundance he speaks of, and when he shakes the plastic bottles of acrylic, listening to the paint 's viscosity but otherwise not knowing what shapes or depths are going to form, the one sure thing is that the painting will be an expression of his longing for the intense light and riskiness of other places. I am not saying that the subject of his recent paintings is exile. As a writer I am at pains to show him I understand that abstraction does not have a subject in the way that a novel has a subject, except in so far as eternity is what we are all about. Indeed, there is a comic moment of painter/novelist anxiety beween us when Hoyland identifies one of his own recurring motifs as a bird, but is quick to explain that he doesn 't mean a literal bird, but the speed and movement of a bird, its agitated passage through space, and I am no less quick to explain in return that an actual bird is the last thing I would expect to see in one of his paintings, whereupon he is quicker still to explain that he knows that I know what not to expect. After which we both fall silent in front of " Spirit River" wondering just how much actual bird he might in fact have painted. What I 'm thinking, faced with that painting, is Icarus - a thought I keep to myself. But that there should be so much as a suggestion of a bird shows how far Hoyland has travelled from the chaste geometrics of pure pigment that characterized his early work, when colour was form and form was colour and that was all ye knew on earth and all ye needed to know. When he talks of those great influential figures, Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clement Greenberg et al - and he does so with remarkable verve and recall, to say nothing of brilliant comic evocation of every theory they espoused and every hallowed paving stone they walked on (the affectionate comedy of a man more impetuous and ebullient, and far less chaste and priestly, than those he mimics) - it is as though they too are of an abundant other world, as faraway now as Bali or Thupelo. Hence, you can 't help thinking, those dark birds of passage, sometimes indistinct and spidery, sometimes almost like a crucifix hurled into the sky, but always in distracted motion, traversing time and place, emissaries of vagabondage and memory. Age will have its way with you. Hoyland is only in his early seventies - nothing for a painter - and exudes immense strength. Part of what is so exciting about the work is the physicality it embodies, the unembarrassed gestural marks - so out of tune with the tentative ironies of contemporary art manufacture which he holds in magnificent contempt - the great curtains of thick paint suggesting sempiternity never mind longevity, the bold death-defiance of the glowing colours. But he has been a force in painting for a long time; movements have been and gone, friends and fellow-painters too. And one of the ways that age, or simply, if you like, duration has its way with you is melancholy. When we stand at his window and look out, discussing the flight of birds again, his conversation turns repeatedly to old painting and carousing companions, fellow marauders and journeyers to lush and distant places, likeminded musketeers of art and danger, who have not survived the big adventure. He is not maudlin, and it would be a brave man who dared to find any of the sweets of sorrow in his dynamic life-committed canvasses. But I notice shapes or presences in his recent work - intimations of other-dimensional space might be a way of describing them - that were not, I think, there before, or at least not there with the insistence with which they recur today. And, to my eye at least, those shapes or densities pulse with emotions to which I am not sure I can satisfactorily give a name, but "tragic" is a start. Are they moons, suns, craters, or just space disappearing into itself? There are circles aplenty in these new paintings, involutions of richly-applied colour which call to mind Van Gogh 's Catherine wheel stars, themselves invoked in "Night Sky" - Hoyland 's homage to Vincent - as icy fireballs of pure white, like damage to the mind. A blue circle in a halo of red hangs where a moon should in "Lone Dance". "Ring of Fire" does what it says, one Cyclopean eye, redder-ringed than a drunk 's, commanding a field of green which doesn 't look as though it 's going to last long. But the eye in "Kingdom" shrinks towards its own centre, a green deepening to black. In other paintings, such as "Rio Crystal", the heart of the painting becomes a void, engulfing itself in silence, defying the fizzing squibs and fiery atoms to come anywhere near. And the deep blue space in "Night Sky" appears to be heading our way, getting larger. However you read these, whether as vortices suggesting the beginning of things, the nothingness out which something came, or as the end, the nothingness to which we have no choice but to return, the sense of some abiding grandeur, a quiet at the heart of creation nothwithstanding all the fireworks of paint, is unmistakable. What 's extraordinary is how dynamic even in their reflectiveness these paintings are. If Hoyland is heading for a late phase, it isn 't going to be one of philosophical surrender. As we 're talking - though I haven 't had the courage to talk to him about a "late phase" - Hoyland 's friend the painter Martin Fuller turns up to join us for lunch. Seeing the new work, he shakes his head in mock-grudging admiration. "Full of bloody life, you old bugger!" he says. Which is, I think, the final, heroical word on Hoyland. HOWARD JACOBSON 2006 |
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 2003 Two Man Exhibitions 1969 1972 1977 1978 1981 |
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