Collaborating with chaos

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 28th May 2008

Andrew Lambirth talks to the artist John Hoyland about his life and work

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 hard-earned freedom of expression.