Collaborating with chaos

Wednesday, 28th May 2008

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

‘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.’