Background
John Hoyland was born on October 12, 1934, in Sheffield, Yorkshire, to a working-class family of John Kenneth and Kathleen Hoyland.
Sheffield School of Art
Mark Rothko
John Hoyland was born on October 12, 1934, in Sheffield, Yorkshire, to a working-class family of John Kenneth and Kathleen Hoyland.
John Hoyland studied at Sheffield School of Art from 1951 to 1956 and subsequently at the Royal Academy Schools from 1956 to 1960.
His career was decisively influenced in the late 1950s and 1960s by his experience of American Abstract Expressionism. In 1953 Hoyland went abroad for the first time, hitch-hiking with a friend to the South of France. Hoyland visited again in 1957 with David Smith when he was at the Royal Academy and got what he referred to as 'The Gauguin syndrome', a lifelong romance with travel and the south.
The 1960s were a crucial decade for Hoyland; it was in those years that he found his voice as an artist. It was also the time when he made his first trip to America, to New York in 1964, traveling on a Peter Stuyvesant Foundation bursary. There he met Robert Motherwell, with whom he was to become great friends, also Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman, and visited their studios. Hoyland's first solo exhibition was held at the Marlborough New London Gallery in 1964 and his first solo museum show at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1967, curated by Bryan Robertson.
In the 1960s, Hoyland's work was characterised by simple shapes, high-key colour and a flat picture surface. In the 1970s his paintings became more textured. He exhibited at the Waddington Galleries, London throughout the 1970s and 1980s. During the 1960s and 1970s, he showed his paintings in New York City with the Robert Elkon Gallery and the André Emmerich Gallery. His paintings were closely aligned with Post-Painterly Abstraction, Color Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction. Hoyland disliked the 'abstract' painter label, describing himself simply as 'a painter.'
Retrospectives of his paintings have been held at the Serpentine Gallery in 1979, the Royal Academy in 1999, and Tate St Ives in 2006. In 1982 he won the John Moores Painting Prize and in 1998 the Royal Academy's Wollaston Award. His works are held in many public and private collections including the Tate and Damien Hirst's Murderme Collection. In September 2010, Hoyland and five other British artists including Howard Hodgkin, John Walker, Ian Stephenson, Patrick Caulfield, and R.B. Kitaj were included in an exhibition entitled "The Independent Eye: Contemporary British Art from the Collection of Samuel and Gabrielle Lurie", at the Yale Center for British Art.
He was also elected to the Royal Academy in 1991 and was appointed Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy Schools in 1999. Hoyland died on July 31, 2011 aged 76, of complications following heart surgery undertaken in 2008. The National Portrait Gallery holds portraits of the artist in its collection.
In 1960 and 1961 Hoyland was one of the youngest artists to exhibit in the Situation exhibitions alongside Harold and Bernard Cohen, William Turnbull, Gillian Ayres, Henry Mundy, and Robyn Denny. John Hoyland has been called "Europe's answer to Mark Rothko" and is regarded as the leading abstract artist of his generation.
Pale Yellow, Pink and Brown
29. 03. 60
Grey / Blue on Green
28.5.66
Untitled (Litograph)
Tembi
6.3.66
Before Time (Mysteries 12) 05-01-11
View
Vigil
One Life - 5.11.07
Life and Love
25. 4. 69
Red, Blue
Orange, Pink
Lebanon
Memphis
No. 22, 20. 2. 62
Brown Black on Pink
Watching 20-1-07
April 1961
The Gnome
Saracen
17. 3. 69
Vincent's Moon - 11.7.07
Green, Orange, Pink
Yellow Boat (7.8.98)
Gadal 10.11.86
25.4.78
Warrior Universe
Yellows
Untitled
Tiger's Eye - 10.3.07
Survivor Man 17.08.08
Sky Ritual
Rankin
North Sound
Spirit Night - 18.06.98
Eyes That Dream - 20.3.08 (Clifford Dies)
Untitled
Reds, Greens
Brown-Beige-Pink
Splay
Untitled
Blood Feud - 28.8.07
15.10.67
20.5.74
19.12.66
Red Black on Pink
Jade Buddha 23.07.08
Love and Grief (5.4.006)
Orange-Pink-Green
Black Something (8.2.90)
18.6.65
Moon's Milk
Untitled II
Blue Moon
Untitled I
Grey / Blue on Pink
Landslide
Trickster
Blues, Greens
Quas (23.1.86)
Tiger Walk 3.4.81
Untitled III
Letter to Chaim - 10.7.06
Anking
Trace
Yellow and Pink
Red Black on Grey
22.8.74
21.1.75
Blues, Reds
Green Sea Moon
30.7.75
4.5.68
12.12.68
Dido
Hoyland preferred not to be known as an abstract painter. He felt it too calculating a term or that it implied some kind of premeditation in his process. After an initial dalliance with figurative painting in the 1950s he became a life-long proponent of the possibilities of non-figurative imagery, which possessed for him.
For Hoyland, it was necessary for paintings to be self-sufficient machines, constructed to convey a powerful charge of visual, mental and emotional energy without recourse to any historically established figurative imagery.
Quotations: “Paintings are a seduction, one develops a relationship with these inanimate objects which becomes a bond like a living person, a mirror, a realm of elusive power. Art plays a game of structural truthfulness, it becomes alive. It contains and understands ecstasy through color as light. The artist must try to make every song sing and push beyond the fixing of appearances.”
Since 1983 John Hoyland was the member of Royal Academy of Arts. In 2000 he became a member of Accademia Nationale in San Luca.
Hoyland was a man of acerbic wit, and a wickedly cruel mimic, but behind a carefully crafted persona there was enormous generosity of spirit and true kindness. A lover of pubs and restaurants, he was a man without side, utterly un-snobbish, and ever aware of his working-class beginnings. He was an inveterate traveller, visiting South America, Australia, and latterly Spain, Italy, Jamaica, and Bali.
Quotes from others about the person
His paintings are abstracts but they are not about absolutes. They are about contingencies and specifics: very particular emotions, thoughts and feelings dependent upon the act of looking.
For a talk at the Tate in the 80s, Hoyland wrote a wonderfully undiscriminating and inclusive list of the subjects, experiences and objects that fired his imagination: "Shields, masks, tools, artefacts, mirrors, Avebury Circle, swimming underwater, snorkelling, views from planes, volcanoes, mountains, waterfalls, rocks, graffiti, stains, damp walls, cracked pavements, puddles, the cosmos inside the human body, food, drink, being drunk, sex, music, dancing, relentless rhythm, the Caribbean, the tropical light, the northern light, the oceanic light. Primitive art, peasant art, Indian art, Japanese and Chinese art, musical instruments, drums, the spectacle of sport, the colour of sport, magic realism, Borges, the metaphysical, dawn, sunsets, fish eyes, trees, flowers, seas, atolls. The Book of Imaginary Beings, the Dictionary of Angels, heraldry, North American Indian blankets, Rio de Janeiro, Montego Bay!"
Henry Matisse, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Emil Nolde, and Nicolas de Staël
John Hoyland was survived by his second wife Beverley Heath Hoyland and his son Jeremy, from his first marriage to Airi Karakainen from 1957 to 1968.
