 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
| John Hoyland |
|
John Hoyland’s new paintings: a miscellany John McEwen ‘In some sub-conscious way I think a lot of these paintings are about death, loss. I think of them as letters to friends. They’re elegies, ’ says John Hoyland. He is 73, and some of his closest friends have died in the last few years. In particular the painters Patrick Caulfield, Piero Dorazio, Terry Frost and Robert Motherwell; and Bryan Robertson, his curatorial and critical champion, first and last, who gave him his initial break into the big time by selecting him for the legendary New Generation exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery Art Gallery in 1964; and his first major public exhibition, also at the Whitechapel, in 1967. John Hoyland does not consider these paintings ‘abstract’. An abstract painting refers to nothing beyond itself. Increasingly his paintings have been openly derived from what he sees, reads, thinks. They make an imaginative virtue of myriad associations, micro to macro; just as he uses a range of techniques to create visual effects beyond the scope of paint brushes. The key to these associations are in his notebooks, his standby when away from the studio on foreign trips. They are dominated by sketches for imagined paintings, drawn with felt-tip pens often from observation. ‘For me these books are like Bob Monkhouse’s joke book. I’m lost without them.’ Unlike Monkhouse, he does not slavishly depend on the contents but sometimes back in the studio ‘a drawing jumps out – ‘what about me!’’ His most recent book, done in Jamaica this February, where he and his partner, Beverly Heath, have an apartment on Montego Bay, contains bird shapes, fish shapes, bamboo leaf shapes, references to lunch, fishing, gardens and, of course, less tangible things. The books form an idea bank, verbal as well as visual. He draws up lists of possible titles, from the literal – The Gecko’s Belly, Serpents & Skulls, Plumed Serpent, Marble & Blood - to the reveries of a sunbather: The Sun’s Sword, Swimming in my Mind, Celestial Fire. There are also thoughts: ‘The only time that the unknown and the inexplicable are allowed to penetrate life is when I am painting, I wish it were otherwise.’ And quotations: ‘The fact that an object so different from all others, a form that achieves the maximum simplicity and regularity and harmony is rotating in the sky cheers life and thought.’ – Italo Calvino, Planet inside an eye. Hoyland was pleased when the late Vic Willing, said to him: ‘John, I didn’t know you were a metaphysical painter.’ John Hoyland: ‘I’ve stuck to non-figurative painting because I think it has the greatest potential for metaphysical depth. Painting Paddington out of the window seems turgid to me. I believe painting has to be for life, a positive thing in the joyous sense of Matisse. I hate melodrama. I love the mystery of Miro and Tapies. I love that hint of alchemy’ – alchemy, the magical turning of base metal into gold; of using pigment, medium and canvas to excite the imagination, to make the spirit soar, to capture the fleetingness of beauty and grandeur of things, to express unspoken feeling. ‘ Meta’ is Greek for ‘beyond’, so metaphysical means beyond the physical. In his painting Hoyland always strives to go beyond – beyond the restriction of the brush to the controlled use of tipped and thrown paint, beyond the photographic to the metaphoric, beyond what has been dared before. As Terry Frost said, he has the ability ‘to ride right on the edge of the saddle’. John Hoyland: ‘I don’t say ‘take the bull by the horns’, I say: ‘Fuck the bull!’’ John Hoyland: ‘When you’re young you paint what you know. When you grow up you take on the challenges of the time. But when you’re old you paint what you don’t know.’ As he tells his biographer, Mel Gooding, in praise of the Picasso’s late works, which were critically dismissed as pathetic signs of senility. ‘Picasso didn’t want to make fine, clever paintings. He was so involved in the spontaneity and emotion of making them…He just ploughed on, taking all sorts of liberties with everything – with colour and form and light and fact and fiction and memory.’ Notebook, 2007: ‘What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.’ – Shelley. When Hoyland started his career there were only two fine arts, painting and sculpture. Painting was more fashionable because of the advent of action painting and the New York School. New York became the centre of artistic influence, as the post-War power-axis tilted decisively from the old world to the new. Jackson Pollock exemplified the change. In his only interview he explained his novel technique of painting canvas laid on the floor in preference to the traditional stretched canvas on the easel, of throwing paint to brushing it on in the time-honoured way: ‘New needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found ways and new means of making their statements. It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture. Each age finds its own technique.’ John Hoyland: ‘If Turner had ever been able to go in an aeroplane and seen the clouds on a flight to Jamaica it would’ve really done his head in. He never saw that! We see so many more things that are available to us.’ From his recent trip to Jamaica he retains a special memory of the all-year flowering bougainvilleas, the aki and mature poinsettia trees – a glorious contrast to the potted stage of its growth now synonymous in England with Xmas. Notebook, 2007: ‘Turner saw endless possibilities in clouds and water and cobwebs.’ John Hoyland: ‘If you’re here in this studio, sitting around, what are you going to watch? The buildings or the sky? I see the dawn, I see the birds. The sky’s a lot more interesting than the buildings.’ Jamaican, notebook, February 2008: ‘ENGLISH SKIES ARE ALMOST ALWAYS SHIT.’ Today fine art has been replaced by artistic flux, just as society has become multi-cultural. Hoyland has seen the art reviled, revived and currently relegated to an unfashionable and subordinate role. ‘Long live the counter culture of painting!’ He proclaims.Lionel Trilling: ‘Good artists steal, bad artists imitate.’ John Hoyland (who worked in New York, 1967-73): ‘By the sixties there was nothing left to steal from American painting. It finished in a dead end. That’s why conceptual art came in. It took a long time before painters felt able to steal from the modern masters, Picasso, Matisse, Miro. I’ll steal from anywhere’ – from the observable world as much as from art. Bali notebook, July 97: ‘Painting is between the noise of bells and running water, between birds and leaf, between the mind and earth.’ Oriental art has inspired many western painters since the Japonism fashion, which swept Europe following Japan’s renewed contact with the West in the mid-19 th century. Post-war US art, western and eastern, re-ignited the fashion. ‘I paint on the floor and this isn’t unusual – the Orientals did that,’ said Pollock. John Hoyland: ‘You know I’ve loved Japanese and Chinese art. Been a huge influence all my adult life. Obviously Hokusai – I don’t really know their names. Haiku poetry. You know there were these painters in Japan who specialised in painting wind - just wind! I think that’s so interesting. I’ve never been to Japan, but I think a lot of it’s in my mind now. Bryan Fielding and me were always interested in Zen, as people were in the sixties.’ Hong Kong notebook, 1999: ‘Leaving my brush behind in Edo. I set forth on a new journey Let me sight-see all The famous views in Paradise.’ Hiroshige John Hoyland, Hans Hofmann: Late Paintings (Tate Gallery 1988): ‘Patrick Caulfield said the most important thing for him at art school was that it gave him ‘time to daydream’.’ Hoyland is adamant painting is a language that has to be learned, like French or musical notation. John Hoyland: ‘So many painters don’t understand colour. They make all the shapes the same size. My paintings are induced. By throwing and splashing paint you can get all the effects of movement. You can’t do that with a brush. They create a sensation of water or air. Life vitality. It’s an extension of Pollock with greater refinement. Put a blob of paint on a knife and throw them until they get right, as Pollock did. These little characters, these minute details, have their own little lives in the galaxy. They’re not about image really. This is what I like, that the paintings can be explored endlessly after the first impact. They’re not emblematic. The minor characters can be major characters.’ Notebook, 2008: ‘If you can’t use colour emotionally you are limited, but if you can’t deal with structure you are equally tied.’ In 1988 Hoyland selected and introduced Hans Hofmann: Late Paintings for the Tate. It was the first European exhibition of Hofmann’s art. The catalogue contained a discussion with a number of British artists, including Hoyland’s close friend Anthony Caro. From Hans Hofmann, Late Paintings : John Hoyland: ‘What makes painting vital for me is that volume can be perceived through colour, and colour perceived as light, radiance.’ Anthony Caro: ‘Hofmann gets there by way of what he’s seen in the outside world and not just the inside world.’ Hoyland paints in four sizes: 100 x 93 in (too big for the Beaux Arts door); 60 x 55; 24 x 20; 12 x 12. The same technique applies, he uses brushes for undercoats (usually black) and spills and flicks for the top coats. John Hoyland: ‘It’s all about glazing. People forget what glazing is – putting a thin coat of paint over another colour – I mean the old masters did it all the time. There is no medium, except water. I agree with the principle of Rothko, that he would use any technique to get what he wanted on the canvas. But I went to the Royal Academy Schools! I don’t mess about with contrary materials because the result is lethal. No wonder they’ve got all those problems with conserving those paintings.’ Each painting is autonomous, there is no pecking order, nothing is a smaller version of something bigger. A Hoyland painting is not of nature, it is itself a natural phenomenon. The paint follows the same gravitational and mineral rules, subject to his violent action or subtle coaxing, as flung earth, meandering water or settling silt. John Hoyland: ‘What if Miro had met Turner. That’s my little thought of the day, Miro meets Turner. Miro, in a way, was very graphic. I’m not graphic. But I’m not Turner, atmospherically. Hopefully, I like to be in between somewhere.’ In his earlier work he used dates for titles, now they are poetically suggestive of moods and subjects. Some are direct, such as Poem for Pier, his friend Piero Dorazio, others reflect the elegiac mood: Dominion (‘And death shall have no dominion’, Dylan Thomas); Wolf Hour; Greetings of Love. As Maurice Cockrill said, simply listing Hoyland’s titles – Firelake, Green Water Moon, Soul Bone – ‘creates a strung poem of astonishing evocativeness’. Blood and Flowers and Lebanon derive from a black-and-white newsprint photograph of a blood-stained floor in a Lebanese hospital, which struck him as looking just like a Hoyland. It was in a review by Robert Fisk, whose writing on the Near East he admires. Hoyland’s feelings can be gauged from his 2008 notebook: ‘Blair ‘Peace Envoy’ HA!’ Eclipse and Watching, two moonlike images he refers to as ‘window paintings’. Soul Bone reintroduces the triangle which so obsessed him in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. Robert Motherwell wrote to him: ‘It’s a funny thing about the diagonal. Once one gets involved in it, one can’t let go and the damned diagonal won’t let go either. I finally gave up in defeat. But I was doing it with black, and I think your using it in colour makes much more sense. Somehow you make it sing in a way I was never able to manage.’ In Greetings of Love tracers of cadmium orange from the sun-splat pierce cadmium red. Perhaps the biggest risk was taken with Dominion. ‘I was so scared before I added the colour. I dreaded getting it wrong because the rest had turned out so well. I waited two days. It was pissing me off because I thought it was so beautiful and I didn’t want to ruin it. And then one day I thought: ‘Fuck this, I’ll just do it.’ I think I just caught it. I did the rest in half-an-hour or so.’ . John Hoyland, Hans Hofmann: Late Paintings : ‘During the final years of his life Hofmann painted works of resounding brilliance as if exulting at last in his ability ‘to swim in colour through mysterious regions and express everything’, as he had long desired to do ‘in paint, holy paint.’ His life-long commitment to ‘search for the real’ in the visual arts was fully realised.’ . Anthony Caro, ditto: ‘Art gives more than all the propaganda that people are wanting, a reflection of society or a design course, all these things art is not intended for. It is a better thing than all that, it tells us that we are worthwhile human beings.’ Bryan Robertson wrote to John Hoyland, 17 January 1995: ‘As an artist, without the shadow of a doubt, you’ve provided for me the greatest and most acute – and often, very often, the most astonished, really surprised - pleasures. The sheer imaginative force of invention, its rigour, always, and its intelligence – pictorial intelligence – never cease to delight me. I see very clearly – that you’re doing your best work, the finest and most complex, freest paintings of your life so far.’ He would surely have said the same again today.
|
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 2005 Lemon Street Gallery, Truro, Cornwall 2006 Beaux Arts, London 2006 John Hoyland: A Focus on the 1960’s and New Works, Tate St Ives 2006 Michael Carr Gallery, Sydney Australia 2007 Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin, Ireland 2007 Gallery Aalders, La Garde Freinet, France 2008 Beaux Arts, London Two Man Exhibitions 1969 1972 1977 1978 1981 |
|