28.4.73

Location

Country: USA
City: Washington DC
Place: British Embassy

28.4.73 reveals John Hoyland’s process of applying a luminescent blend of colours to a canvas using a variety of techniques. Working up the paint in a series of layers, a rose coloured L-shaped form predominates, appearing to simultaneously hover and anchor itself to the surface. Paint drips from the edges of the flat blocks of colour like fringing and the occasional thrown and smeared lumps of paint point to Hoyland’s love of the texture and consistency of paint.

From the early 1970s, Hoyland experimented with direct methods of pouring and splattering paint and later developed his technique with expressive brushstrokes and paint applied using a palette knife. Commenting on his preference for abstract painting he said: 

Painting has to be for life, a positive thing in the joyous sense of Matisse ... I hate melodrama ... I’ve stuck to non-figurative painting because I think it has the greatest potential for metaphysical depth. Painting Paddington out of the window seems turgid to me. I just don’t find it interesting. But it’s something the English seem to like a lot. They want an immediate explanation for everything. If they don’t get it, they ridicule it or become hostile. They feel they’re being insulted. 

Hoyland’s paintings are often titled or subtitled with the date that a work was completed, in this case 28 April 1973. This method of identifying his work complements his overall approach to abstract painting, capturing the experience associated with an event or moment in time. He has said ‘Paintings are there to be experienced… They are to be felt through the eye… not to be understood.’

John Hoyland was a leading British abstract painter, who became well-known during the 1960s. He studied figurative fine art at Sheffield School of Art, abandoning this approach, later while at the Royal Academy Schools in London. He was heavily influenced by the exhibition The New American Painting, held at the Tate Gallery, London (1959), and which included work by American abstract painters, particularly Mark Rothko. In that same year Hoyland’s abstract paintings were removed from his graduation show by the President of the Royal Academy and he received a Diploma based only on his figurative work. During the 1960s and 1970s Hoyland lectured at art colleges in London and developed close links with America. In 1970 he was appointed as the Charles A. Dana Professor of Fine Art at Colgate University, Hamilton, New York. He returned to England in 1973. The vibrancy of colour in Hoyland’s work is also the result of his extensive travels to India, South-East Asia, Australia, the Caribbean and the Eastern Mediterranean. His work is represented in numerous British and international collections, including: the Tate Collection, London; the Albright-Knox Gallery, New York; and the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro. In 2001 he received an Honorary Doctorate from Sheffield Hallam University. His solo exhibitions include retrospectives at the Royal Academy of Art and Graves Art Gallery Sheffield (both 2001) and The Trajectory of a Fallen Angel, Tate St Ives, 2006.

Places

Subjects

abstract

Materials & Techniques

acrylic (paint), canvas, acrylic painting

Artist

John Hoyland (1934 - 2011)

Title

28.4.73

Date

1973

Medium

Acrylic on canvas

Dimensions

height: 183.00 cm, width: 167.50 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Waddington Galleries, March 1974

Inscription

verso: 28.4.73. Hoyland

GAC number

11021