John Hoyland – an appreciation

It’s difficult to believe that John Hoyland is dead. He was a man so full of life, with such appetite for living, that his absence from our midst makes no sense. Even when grievously ill in the past months, he was more likely to engage in anecdote and tell jokes than complain of his increasingly frail condition. The spirit of the man continued to shine brilliantly despite the adverse circumstances.

His last exhibition, all new paintings, opened at the Beaux Arts Gallery in Cork Street in April. At the private view, Hoyland, although already much reduced physically, sat in the midst of his vividly coloured and exhilarating work, and accepted the homage of friends and admirers. Despite his waning energy, he talked to young and old alike, new recruit and old freeloader, with familiar warmth and infectious good humour. The wonder of it was that he had produced such a vibrant body of new work when mortally ill; and in that determination lies the key to his success as a man and an artist.

John Hoyland was born in Sheffield in 1934, and studied at Sheffield College of Art and the Royal Academy Schools in London, before discovering the light and colour of Europe in the late 1950s. He never looked back to the industrial grime of Sheffield, but geared his art to celebratory colour and abstract form. Early influences included Matisse and de Staël, and then the American Abstract Expressionist painters, a number of whom he came to know when he started to visit the States in the early 1960s. So began a crucial relationship with American art and culture that informed Hoyland’s early work and led to him living for a time in New York. Although in 1973 he settled back in England, he retained certain transatlantic mannerisms: in vocabulary and manner of speech (a slight but pleasing drawl), and in his personal appearance (a fondness for cowboy boots and denim).