Collaborating with chaos
Andrew Lambirth talks to the artist John Hoyland about his life and work
John Hoyland dislikes being called ‘one of Britain’s leading abstract painters’. He thinks it’s lazy thinking, and over-reliance on labelling. ‘They don’t say: “Lucian Freud, leading figurative painter” — he’s just a painter. Or “Francis Bacon, leading melodramatist”.’ Mention of Bacon sends him off on a tangent, one of the digressions that make Hoyland’s conversation — along with his forthright opinions — so rewarding and enjoyable. ‘I look at Bacon’s paintings and instead of being moved by them they make me want to laugh. They’re supposed to be horrible and moving and frightening, but they’re so shrill and so theatrical. I like drama in music or painting, but not melodrama.’ And having dismissed one of the most expensive and sought-after of modern British artists, he leans back and grins. Hoyland is not too keen on auction rooms and the prices they generate. His own Sixties’ work is currently a focus of buyers’ attention, generating auction records, and he finds it rather annoying. A true artist, he is really only interested in his latest work or what he is about to do, not in the achievements of 40 years ago. ‘I think the vultures are circling a bit,’ he says with a chuckle. ‘I suppose artists’ early work always fetches more money. It can be irritating when people forget whole swathes of work, like the paintings I did in the Seventies and Eighties.’ Of course, what is needed is a full-scale Hoyland retrospective, and the Tate is the place for such a show, though under the current regime such an exhibition is unlikely. Has England so many artists of international stature that they can afford to ignore such a figure as Hoyland? Of course not, yet it seems that our museums are more interested in showing foreign artists than the home-grown variety. Meanwhile, Hoyland continues to paint in his London studio just north of Smithfield Market, and to have shows of vibrant new work. One exhibition has just finished at Beaux Arts in Cork Street, while another continues at Lemon Street Gallery in Truro until 7 June.
Although Hoyland’s latest work, with its effervescent colour combinations and its wild paint-trails, seems to some like an arsonist’s night out in a fireworks factory, it’s not all madcap celebration. A very recent painting, a dark beauty we look at in the studio, is called ‘Goodbye’; not exactly exuberant. In fact, he can’t stand art that is perpetually euphoric. He himself is more often than not in elegiac mood these days. ‘I’ve been doing these paintings called “Letters” to people I admire. There’s one to Chaim Soutine and a couple to van Gogh. I’ve been rereading his letters. I’ve done a number of paintings in the past couple of years that just came over me from the deaths of friends: Patrick Caulfield, Bryan Robertson, Terry Frost, Piero Dorazio.’ Robertson was the inspired critic and director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery who gave Hoyland his first museum show in 1967; Dorazio was a famous Italian painter. All were close friends that Hoyland misses. The Grim Reaper has been busy.
‘I think painting should express all kinds of different things, not be limited. I can’t think of anything worse than just taking painting towards refinement, if you don’t allow yourself to change. I don’t force change on myself, it just happens. I’d probably get bored if I did the same thing all the time. Not so long ago I said I’d like to be able to paint anything in a painting. I think I’m getting there slowly. Robert Motherwell gave me a book on Miró. He’s supposed to be the great surrealist with a fantastic imagination but he went on the beach every day picking stuff up — a bit of string, a shell, a bit of wood. If Miró needed outside stimulation then who am I to think that I can keep on developing through a kind of formalist grid? That opened me up to plundering nature.’ His work now is as likely to take its impulse from something seen on his travels as it is to be formed from one colour working with or against another. After half a century of endeavour, he has won through to a hardearned freedom of expression.
John Hoyland was born in Sheffield in 1934 and went to art school there before gaining a place at the Royal Academy Schools and coming to London. He first made his name in the Sixties for bold abstract works which entirely rejected the observable world and dealt exclusively in shape and colour. (A selection of these paintings along with some gouaches, all from Hoyland’s own collection, is being shown at Nevill Keating Pictures, 5 Pickering Place, St James’s Street, London SW1, 020 7839 8386, from 11 June to 4 July.) From 1967 he spent increasing amounts of time in America, associating with such artists as Rothko, Newman and Motherwell, but in the Seventies he returned to settle in England.
‘I’ve managed to make a living out of painting — a precarious one. When I came back from New York in 1972, the big announcement had been made — it hadn’t hit America — that the death of painting had already occurred. I’d had a posh job here, principal lecturer at Chelsea [1964–70]. When I gave that up, William Scott said to me, “You’re mad, that’s the best job in London: three days a week and seven months’ holiday a year with pay.” But I’d heard this David Sylvester interview with de Kooning. De Kooning said that he thought it was important psychologically to put “Artist” in your passport not “Artist/Teacher”. So I decided I was going to do that and get out of teaching. Looking back on it, it was a smart thing to do.’ Why did he come back? ‘It was partly private. My girlfriend at the time was a singer. I learnt a lot from her and really enjoyed being around that music scene and meeting all those guys — Thelonious Monk, people like that. But the trouble was that she wanted me to travel with her. The thing is, if you’re an artist, you’ve got to stay in a room on your own and work. You can’t be always hanging around late at night for the second show. I’m an early riser. And I missed the richness of Europe and my friends. So it was a combination of things.
‘Also, I wasn’t a great success in America. Art has to come from inside you. What I really didn’t like was that in America, it was all coming at you. Like: “Are you in this show? D’you know what he’s just sold for? You’d better get on the ball, kid, you’d better get in there.” Pressure all the time. I came back and decided I wouldn’t paint a lot of pictures, I’d just keep on one until I’d completely resolved it. So I switched working methods.’ Instead of the staining of colour he was known for, he began to use a palette-knife and Polyfilla along with the paint. It was a very different approach and typical of his ability to change tack, whatever the cost to his reputation. Since then, he has altered course whenever he had to. He lives and works in London, travels regularly to Spain and the Caribbean, making little diagrams of possible forms for his paintings in sketchbooks. In the studio he tends to put down a dark ground on a canvas with a paintbrush and then add glazes of iridescent paint. On top of that he works mostly with spilled or poured paint, with the canvas on the floor. ‘And of course I throw paint, which gives it a kind of energy. I can throw four colours in one clump. It’s like the blind Zen archer — you gradually get more accurate.
‘Pollock used to draw with paint through holes in cans to get the extended line you can’t get with a brush. I’m doing something very similar.’ Hoyland squeezes liquid acrylic paint from bottles, exploiting the unpredictability of its behaviour, though long years of experimenting have taught him how his materials will react. ‘I’ll often do a test on the floor, to see how the paint is going to come out. [Hoyland’s studio floor is famous and much-photographed. People have even wanted to buy it.] But when it comes to the actual act on the painting you just have to grab your balls and charge.
‘I’ve spent a lot of the past ten years looking for visual structures that I find satisfying, though at the moment there is less and less structure in my work. Suddenly I find that my paintings seem not to require it. I’m painting oxygen or something. Air. I’ve always thought that paintings needed to be structured, otherwise all you’ve got is chaos.’ But now he is collaborating with chaos and still somehow managing to ride the wave. ‘I like to try to make these pictures paint themselves,’ he says. ‘The less you impose, the fresher it is. Painting is a kind of alchemy. When you’re young, you want to show everybody what a tough guy you are, how strong you can paint and how you can knock everybody around. As you get older you want to show how intelligent you are, how you know the game and how subtle and penetrating you can be. Then when you get old, you’re just compelled to paint what you don’t know. That’s what’s happened to me.’
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