Art’s hard graft

Once, when a number of Royal Academicians were invited to Buckingham Palace, the celebrated abstract painter John Hoyland (1934–2011) found himself enjoying a conversation with the Duke of Edinburgh about art. ‘The real problem with painting,’ said the Duke, in Hoyland’s delighted re-telling of this encounter, ‘is not so much the doing of it, as to know what to paint.’ Hoyland immediately concurred, adding that his friend Patrick Caulfield had been saying the same thing only the day before.

This definition of painting’s central challenge appears again in Studio Voices, recollected by Tess Jaray as one of the first things her tutor at the Slade, Andrew Forge, told her. In the same interview, Jaray, herself an abstract painter, claimed that Hoyland only spent seven-and-a-half minutes teaching a day, the rest of his time being devoted to chasing girls. It’s a shame Hoyland isn’t here to answer back, bearing in mind that one of his finest paintings was hung upside down in a memorial display of his work at the RA when Jaray was the senior hanger.

Personalities have always publicly clashed in the art world, long before Constable was upstaged by Turner at an Academy Varnishing Day in 1832. Michael Bird’s fascinating compilation of interviews recorded for the Artists’ Lives project of the National Sound Archives (housed at the British Library and largely accessible to the public), brings such conflicts and confabulations into focus, highlighting the early years, studentship and professional travails of more than 40 artists.

The book is very much a personal selection, so Hoyland appears only in passing — which is a great loss, as he was an extremely funny interviewee, and humour is not much in evidence in these pages. But Bird has chosen some good stuff, and the authentic voice of the artist speaks clearly through his commentary and linking passages.