Work John Hoyland RA (born 1934)
John Hoyland RA (born 1934)
An English born painter and printmaker, Hoyland trained at Sheffield College of Art from 1950 and the Royal Academy Schools from 1956. Under the influence of Nicholas de Staël he began to paint Sheffield landscapes and abstractions from still-life subjects. His devotion to colour began with experiments at a Scarborough summer school in 1957. At the Situation exhibitions of 1960–61 he showed some of his earliest fully abstract paintings in which he used bands of colour to explore perceptual effects such as the relationship of image to background or to create the illusion of buckling the picture-plane. This geometric character soon gave way to sinuous lines enclosing discs of colour, and eventually to a freer and more fluid application of paint.
Hoyland's paintings were included in the successful exhibition The New Generation in 1964. Travelling to New York, Hoyland met and visited the studios of Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman and Rothko. He also met the critic Clement Greenberg and the young painters Greenberg was championing at the time: Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski.
Elements from these American developments, especially post-painterly abstraction, feature prominently in subsequent canvases by Hoyland such as 1.11.68 (1968; London, Tate) in the use of staining techniques and acrylic paint, the interaction of unmixed colours, and an emphasis on the material weight of paint. Despite these influences, however, Hoyland came to reject the American tendency to reductivism, concentrating in later paintings on the approach exemplified by Hofmann and de Staël, with varied and tactile paint surfaces and a disposition of blocks of different colours to create sensations of advancing and receding space. From the late 1960s Hoyland applied these methods to screen prints, lithographs and later to etchings and monotypes.
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