| John
Hoyland Art | John Hoyland [b.1934] | Artist John Hoyland
John Hoyland
John
Hoyland born 1934
English painter and printmaker. He trained at Sheffield College of
Art (1951–6) and the Royal Academy Schools (1956–60).
Under the influence of Nicholas de Staël he began by 1954 to
paint Sheffield landscapes and abstractions from still-life subjects.
His devotion to colour began with experiments at a Scarborough summer
school (1957), where tuition was provided by Victor Pasmore, Tom Hudson
(b 1922) and Harry Thubron (1915–85). At the Situation exhibitions
of 1960–61 he showed some of his earliest fully abstract paintings
such as Situation (1960; Alistair McAlpine priv. col.), 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.
John Hoyland's visit to New York in 1964
on a Peter Stuyvesant bursary brought him into contact with painters
such as Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski and
with the critic Clement Greenberg, who showed him the work of Hans
Hofmann and unexhibited canvases by Morris Louis. Elements from these
American developments, especially from colour field painting and 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 such as 22.5.75 (1975;
London, Brit. Council) and North Sound (1979; London, Tate) 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 also to screenprints, lithographs
and later to etchings and monotypes.
John Hoyland | John Hoyland [b.1934]
| Artist John Hoyland
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