JOHN HOYLAND IN CONVERSATION WITH PETER DICKINSON
JOHN
HOYLAND
IN
CONVERSATION
WITH
PETER
DICKINSON
John Hoyland has been
a highly influential
abstract painter for
over fifty years and his
friends have included
Barnett Newman,
Helen Frankenthaler,
Mark Rothko and
Robert Motherwell.
Hoyland is now in his
seventy-sixth year and
he gave this candid
interview with Peter
Dickinson of Abstract
Painting England (APE)
for Turps Banana earlier
this summer.
PAGE 16/78
PD: You mentioned Gary Hume,
who appears to be a currently feted and
influential, what do you think of
his work?
JH: I don’t think he is influential and
he makes Patrick Caulfield look like
Leonardo. Don’t forget his teacher was
Michael Craig-Martin. They make me
think of an advert on television, with a
kid being asked by a teacher what lesson
are you doing this morning and the kid
answers “colouring-in”.
Some artists download or draw up
images – a bucket, a ladder, a pipe
– whatever is required so they can
manipulate them on the computer,
changing the scale and the colours.
They can make a bucket bigger than a
ladder, a pipe bigger than a shoe etc, and
then they just arrange these things and
put a black line around them. Adami,
the Italian artist, who came out of Leger
and Juan Gris and Lichtenstein, wasn’t
that good, but did something far more
interesting. Some contemporary painters
have lost me along the way. They have
a technique at Royal Academician (RA)
meetings of suddenly putting on their
solicitor’s hat. The nearest analogy I can
give you is Lichtenstein’s brush strokes
or illustrations of brush strokes. Now it’s
Walt Disney meets Tokyo that’s all the
rage. It’s all Jeff Koonsy, empty, shallow,
done without feeling, no emotional
content, decorative pretty glitter – they
are terrible. And you have got that other
artist – the little drawings that she does
of birds, little scratchy jobs. If you draw
on an etching plate and you let all the
scuffmarks print it looks much better than
a pencil drawing. Even her blankets are
just folk art.
PD: Are there any contemporary
painters that you rate highly?
JH: There are noble souls such as
Anthony Whishaw. He uses colour like
a Spaniard, but unevenly so that at one
moment you think he has got it and the
next thing he hasn’t.
PD: This is a curve ball for me because
Anthony Whishaw’s pictures are closely
toned, and from my memory frequently
use muted earthy colours, and certainly
in my experience folks find your palette
far more jolting.
JH: Yes.
PD: So how about reductionists like
Callum Innes and Ian Davenport.
JH: Cold soup served hot as Louis
Armstrong. Schnabel is doing films now,
but he was good and when he was very
erratic and shocking, in that New York
brash way – a coarseness that isn’t part of
a European sensibility.
PD: There is a similarity with your work
and one of the reasons it appeals to me…
JH: He would just tear a side of a car
and stick it on the canvas. I could never
do that.
PD: Isn’t that part of your Englishness?
JH: It’s part of European culture.
PD: In Mel Gooding’s book on you he
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Advance Town
1980, Acrylic on canvas
(213 x 198 cm)
Courtesy of the artist
PAGE 17/78
Untitled
Gouache on Paper
1965
Courtesy of the artist
JOHN HOYLAND IN CONVERSATION WITH PETER DICKINSON
PAGE 18/78
mentions that Motherwell acknowledged
you as the new Turner. What do you
think he meant by this?
JH: He said I ‘could’ be the next Turner
– he didn’t say I was.
PD: Ok, but he made the connection.
JH: Yes, but I am not sure why. He gave
me a book on Turner in which he had
highlighted with pencil all the bits about
light, radiance and the sublime as notes
for himself, not as instructions to me, but
he was a great teacher.
PD: I think he recognised the similarity
in that both Turner and you took a
step away from what was going with
contemporaries to the bemusement of
many. There is the obvious connection
with the stuff of paint and light but
Turner took a leap away from an English
‘correctness’. That is, paradoxically, an
English trait. And you stepped away from
Modernism.
JH: Maybe, I don’t know, but I have
imagined what Turner would have
produced if he had been on a jet – if he
had seen clouds, a landscape or a volcano
from a plane. God can you imagine it?
Motherwell was very fond of Miro, who
was one of his favourite artists and I
just thought vaguely, at the back of my
mind, that Turner meets Miro would not
be a bad combination – all the passion,
freedom and the graphic quality of Miro
combined with the non-graphic Turner.
How to get the melting together of these
two aspects of looking – getting them
working together is of interest to me.
PD: Do you feel that you stepped away
from the 1960s Modernist feel?
JH: I stepped away from it in the 1960s.
There were a number of reasons I came
back from America. One of them was
that the Americans, a little older than
me but my contemporaries, like Nolan,
Olitski and Stella, had blown it, they had
done what they were going to do.
They were repetitive, grandiose and they
were bringing out their new commercial
line each season. Motherwell was the one
that bridged the gap because he had a
great love of Europe, mainly in his head
because he wasn’t traveling then.
The Open series, so called because I think
he got that idea from a photograph of a
window of a Spanish house that he saw in
a National Geographic magazine. I was
looking at the dates the other day, I am
not making any claim but I have a feeling
I was doing that before him because I
had a show in 1967 with the blocks.
PD: With the crack and edges?
JH: And Motherwell was still doing
synthetic Cubism. I remember he came
to my opening at the Robert Elkon
Gallery in 1967 and said, “How much
is that painting?” and I said $2000 or
something, and he said if it was $25,000
you would sell it. I never did sell it.
I’ve still got it. What was so wonderful
about Motherwell was that he was
highly educated and highly cultured
in an American way. If you spent five
minutes with Motherwell you would
always learn something. If he talked
about the Napoleonic wars he could tell
you all about the authors, the composers
and the painters of the time. He was a
good lateral thinker, cross-referencing
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PAGE 19/78
Untitled
1971
Acrylic on canvas
(198 x 305 cm)
Courtesy of the artist
different things all the time. He was
steeped in Matisse and Picasso and one
of the reasons he was unpopular was that
the Americans, particularly the younger
painters, felt he was too European.
And there was no doubt he was very
European, but he was also an archetypal
East Coast America boy.
All that flat board, white painted houses,
and sand dunes and sky, those were his
colours. Another reason for returning
from America was that I was also getting
impatient with all those guys coming
at you, every magazine you opened
they were there and the work was just
becoming decorative. Then, partly
because I saw two little Hoffman’s, who
I recognised had the same heroes as me
from Expressionism and Fauvism and
had work that wasn’t too over-laden
with Surrealism, but had the possibility
that two plus two could make more than
4 – Europe had a pull for me. My son
was a young teenager, my mum and dad
were both alive and all my closest friends
were here in England. I had a longing to
go and look at De Stael again and visit
Rome and Paris again. Just the idea that
they were more accessible was attractive.
And another reason for leaving was
that New York is alright for very young
people and I think that a lot of the artists
that stayed on in New York were more
interested in money than anything else
because if you make it in New York it is
just another level. Instead of art having a
time where it can gestate, in New York it
is all “Are you in that show? Do you know how
much he sells for?” And it is all that hostile
commercial hustle which is an artificial,
external pressure, when you really need
the work too slowly gestate internally
and come out from within you. There it
was, all surface, and now it has gone to
an extreme with people like Koons who
apply marketing methods. In my day
marketing was opening the gallery door.
Leslie Waddington said he opened the
gallery door and then started inviting
critics for champagne but after a while
they stopped coming because they were
so fucking bored with the champagne
and free lunch. Of course, we were on the
whole, poorly served by our critics – they
don’t really like the visual arts.
PD: Do you think that you were part of a
JOHN HOYLAND IN CONVERSATION WITH PETER DICKINSON
PAGE 20/78
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Above: Maverick Days
1983
Acrylic on canvas
(229 x 213 cm)
Opposite page: Lust and Luxuries
1984
Acrylic on canvas
(254 x 244 cm)
Both courtesy of the artist
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Untitled
1984
Acrylic on canvas
(230x 235cm)
Courtesy of the artist
JOHN HOYLAND IN CONVERSATION WITH PETER DICKINSON
PAGE 22/78
movement after the 1960s, after you left
New York and came back?
JH: I have continued a dialogue in my
mind with my heroes – Rothko who I
met a few times luckily, Barnett Newman
who I met quite a lot, Ad Reinhart, Bob
(Motherwell), Helen Frankenthaler, and
Tony Caro. I was lucky it gave me a
chance to step out of the parochialism
of England and St Ives. I don’t see
American Art as a movement; it was
about ambition and quality. By then I
had become a maverick.
PD: So where do you think you are now
given that you are about to go back to
America with a big show at The Yale
Centre for British Art?
JH: Well, I have forgotten half the
pictures because they were bought just
after I had done them. I’ll know them
when I see them. I don’t know what kind
of mixed bag it is going to be. The guy
that bought them is a friend now – he has
been extremely courageous in his choice
of work.
PD: Do you feel more connected with
America or Europe now?
JH: I don’t feel connected with America.
I always thought I would because my
generation grew up in the cinema – we
were in the cinema three nights a week.
Rationing was still on here when I was
first in the US. You saw guys in big cars
with white wall tyres and beautiful girls,
cowboy hats and horses and the big open
spaces. I thought fuck, that’s for me.
Anybody would who lived in Sheffield,
the most polluted city in the world at
the time along with Pittsburgh, both
steel towns. So of course it was a dream
America, swashbuckling Errol Flynn
and Tyrone Powers, all the romance
of America and the West. One is still
influenced by those values.
PD: Did you meet De Kooning?
JH: No, I didn’t want to meet
De Kooning.
PD: Did you ever meet Phillip Guston?
JH: No, never did. Guston lived out in
the country. I’ll tell you who I did meet
was Pollock’s widow, Lee Krasner – a
tremendous woman. She was a real
ballsy artist’s moll. She wasn’t beautiful,
but boy she had the heart of a lion.
She was serious, not in a somber way but
ruthlessly serious about good art.
PD: I wondered if you ever had the same
dilemma as Guston, the battle in your
mind with figuration?
JH: No, not at that time, and I never
wanted to go there completely. I have
dabbled, and with Modernism. I began
to feel, as I still do, and I think my point
has been proven over the last thirty years
that it was a limited form of expression,
tripes, in the end! Although Nolan got
away with it occasionally because of
his unusual colour sense – he would
put together colour combinations other
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FEATURE
people wouldn’t think of. Bridget Riley I
have always found to be terribly tedious
and boring, really boring. Well marketed
at the time and I think the name Bridget
helped, being a woman helped.
But doing Moiré pattern is visual
perception stuff. I taught visual
perception for a time but I know where
these interpretations of line and other
forms of perspective come from. People
said “God, It must be good if it hurts your eyes.”
To me they are just shallow skins. They
talk about ambiguity but there is only a
one dimensional ambiguity, is the white
in front of the black? I am fond of Bridget
though, she is rather shrill. When you get
older you mellow a bit towards people
but I have never rated her at all. I rated
John Walker. I think he is a very, very
good, clever painter.
I don’t know what he is doing now
though. He’s moved around a lot,
I suppose that’s healthy really.
PD: Have you ever been tempted to
reintroduce figuration?
JH: I have gone pretty close to the
knuckle with it. If you take somebody like
Auerbach and all that sludge brigade as I
call them, they go round and round on a
painting but very often, at the end of the
day, they have to put the eyes and mouth
in like a cartoon and it often doesn’t gel
with the form of the surface.
It has an added look. I have always
felt with Kossoff and Auerbach that
I’m always knocking them. I shouldn’t
because I don’t know them. They are
probably very nice people, but Auerbach
was probably the champion artist when
he left the Royal College and in some
ways has remained the champion artist,
but in my view he should have been onto
Soutine straight away who is a fantastic
painter. He could paint with limpid paint
but still paint a hand or an eye and get
it all in and through the paint. Bacon
aspired to that but never achieved it.
They were not brave enough. My wife
is Jamaican and sometimes she says to
me “You Dark.” Now that doesn’t mean
that I am dark coloured, it means I am
dark hearted, and I think we all are to a
greater or lesser extent. Some are dark
all the time and some people are too
fucking euphoric all the time. Another
cliché but painting is autobiographical.
My old pictures were about fucking
women. Women were my profession
and painting my serious hobby. But as
you get older and you physically weaken
and your friends start to die you start to
think about death and one’s mortality
and the physical experiences aren’t the
same as they were. You become more
thoughtful, more cerebral. Cerebral is the
wrong word but perhaps more spiritual,
although I hate to use that word.
PD: Why?
JH: Because it has religious connotations
and I am not religious in the sense of the
Church of England or the Catholicism.
Nature is religion for me, and a lot of
other people. If you want to worship
anything worship nature; it’s mysterious
and creative.
PD: So are you connecting with nature
through painting?
JH: Yes, I think so. The old “I want to
make the equivalent of a flower but not copy one.”
And also I fell into it over the last twenty
years, whereby I am making the paintings
more like nature creates form. A plant is
organic like our bodies and everything is
there for a reason, but the way a tree is
placed in the landscape is inorganic.
The tree is organic but its situation isn’t.
So I try and bring all those things in, let
the paint do what it wants and behave in
a way that gets things happening that you
can’t get with a brush or a spray gun or a
stencil. The trick is to hold it all together
with filigree, a fragile thread and see if
you can pull it off.
PD: In my conversations with other
painters you often seem to split them
right down the middle. There are those,
like my colleague David Moxon and
Marcus Harvey is another, who likes
your work up to the late 1980s, and then
there are those that aren’t excited by
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JOHN HOYLAND IN CONVERSATION WITH PETER DICKINSON
John Hoyland
Photographed by Nick Smith
your earlier flat blocks. The circles tend
to be the meeting ground. Then there
are those that like the latter works with
the fluorescent colours and the contorted
forms. David and others have found
these difficult to reconcile. However,
I like the disjointed layers and forms
and the rudeness of some of the visual
interventions. My point to them is that
one of the hardest things is to come up
with new form and certainly form that
surprises and challenges.
JH: This is it of course. It makes sense in
the twenty-first century, to search for
new hybrids.
PD: It is my contention that you do it.
One of the rudest things for me is the
paint straight out of the tube with such
vibrant colours, and they don’t like
that jolt and that is one of the factors I
respond to in that work.
JH: I want everything in a painting.
I want mystery and now more than ever
before. I was wham bam thank you
m’am when I was young. The paintings
are more contemplative now and
certainly darker. Death of friends affects
you.
You don’t want to think about it but you
do, you can’t help it and it just comes
out.
PD: But are there things that shock you,
a motif or a process that has come out of
the engagement with painting?
JH: Well, Gaza and Lebanon for one
thing, cruelty amongst people. I am not
particularly political as I have lost faith in
the people that go into politics, but those
events are totally outrageous and the
hypocrisy of the West in not standing up
and being counted.
PD: What do think Motherwell meant
by describing painting as ethical?
JH: I think he meant holding firm beliefs,
holding on to those beliefs to paint from
the mind, the hand and the heart.
Like when Roualt said “I am more moved by
the gaze of Rembrandt than by all of Napoleon’s
achievements.” Have you seen my new
book by Andrew Lambirth, which shows
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a series I did called Lebanon. A lot of these
are pre heart operation. I was doing
heart pictures before I knew I had a
problem. I don’t know how but they
just arrived.
A lot of the new pictures are letters
to heroes, letters to dead people and
homages to people I have admired and
art I have loved.
PD: I notice from Mel Gooding’s book
that you knew Denis Bowen.
JH: Yes, I knew Denis a bit.
PD: He is quoted as having said that
your work was “exquisite”.
JH: And he always said I was the ‘boss’.
PD: Well, he got me started with this
addiction to painting and apparently you
reacted to his description of ‘exquisite’?
JH: Oh yeah, that was when I was a
student, in Art News and Reviews and
I thought fucking hell, if I am exquisite
then I am not me. I am doing something
wrong here.
PD: Coming from Denis wouldn’t the
term have had a certain flavour that
wasn’t related to prettiness?
JH: Yeah, but it was a refinement, it
referred to that I didn’t feel what was
genuine from me. I was doing stripe
paintings in 1960, before Bridget and
teaching optics at Hornsey. So they are
split between love and hate, aren’t they?
PD: Yes. The marks are identifiable as
Hoyland, they are raw and they are not
an English aesthetic but neither are they
American. There is a punkish waking-up.
You have spoken about paintings being a
means of measuring our space and I took
this as being a metaphorical description,
and this connects with this jolt.
Without it habitual production of pretty
pictures takes place.
JH: You have always got to watch it.
I would rather make an ugly picture than
a pretty one.
PD: Why is that?
JH: Well it probably becomes ugly from
being dissatisfied and pushing too long
and then getting nothing. Sometimes,
after a time, the ugly ones become
ISSUE NINE
FEATURE
more beautiful.
PD: What do think of Denis’s work?
JH: You know he had the problem that
a lot of English artists have, and I learnt
this failing early on, that he never had
a proper studio. So there was a kind of
dilettantism to nearly all of English art
including the St Ives people. They would
go to Egypt, do a bit of drawing and do a
bit of poetry then take a break and fall in
love and be unhappy. When French art
was good the painters were going to their
studios every fucking day of the week
and hammering it out, and after they
would go to the café and hammer out
the philosophy of painting. You have to
have a setup that allows you to paint. You
have to have an ample studio; you have
got to have paints. You can’t do it with
spray guns on the back of scrap paper.
Take Roger Hilton who was a very gifted
artist and look at the last five years of
his life. He only really painted well for
about a decade, you realise that he let his
drinking get in the way. His intellectual
discipline had gone. He was doing
charming things on paper but he should
have been doing his greatest paintings
then, but he was over indulged and over
indulgent. It is such a shame.
I am a wreck myself but not as wrecked
as he was. He died at 60 you know.
Most of the Americans only painted well
for one decade. Rothko’s paintings were
bloody terrible until the mid 1950s.
Then after about 1965 he started going
terrible again. Barnett Newman hardly
had a painting career. De Kooning was
very self-destructive. He was an absolute
shit – you know he stowed away to
America and was awarded their highest
academic award, and he was scared that
they would find out before he got the
award despite the fact that he had been
there for about forty or fifty years.
PD: So you think English art is contained
by its lack of ambition?
JH: Not only that. Take Victor Pasmore,
who taught me a lot and very quickly in
just half an hour – he was a very good
artist and a lovely man but I always think
he is a bit like Humphrey Littleton, a
very good trumpeter, very good man but
he was not fucking Miles Davis. David
Hockney is Elton John to me. I want to
be Miles Davis who nobody knows.
PD: You’re very much about ‘free
process’, so how do you feel about the
term ‘old jazzer’?
JH: I did a talk on Sir Henry Rushbury
recently and I recalled a time at the
Royal Academy Schools when I had to
ask him if I could go to France during
term time. He said, “Go and paint sunshine
boy.” But I was also asked what the tutors
were like when I was a student at the
RA and I said, “They were a bunch of grey
haired old farts that didn’t know what we were
doing.” And as I said it I realised that is
me now, with what is going on. But I
have absolutely, in my life and work,
never seen a great work of art produced
by a computer. They are like typewriters
– computers they are nothing to the
brain and the sensibilities of the body, its
ability, the blood, the flesh, heart
and hand.
PD: Do you listen to music while
you work?
JH: No, I used to. I would listen to
Stravinsky, Mahler who I like very
much. I used to really psyche myself
up with screaming divas and the blues
and I found it was artificially hyping me
up somehow. I was trying to produce
a visual equivalent to this stuff and so I
have cut it out all together now. I don’t
like watching music on TV because you
are constantly distracted by the first
violinist’s tits or something. They give
you close ups of fingers trying to make
it visually interesting but it shouldn’t
be on the TV – you keep checking the
orchestra out. I like the old blues – that
works on television. There is a guy
called Jamie Cullum, he’s a nice little
twerp but he’s trying to play like a black
man in the 1920s. There seems to be
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JOHN HOYLAND IN CONVERSATION WITH PETER DICKINSON
little historical awareness. When film
maker’s quote Back to the Future as their
major influences I think of Moreau and
De Sica, Fellini, Simone Signoret, all
those classic people not known, fucking
hell. Patrick Caulfield said he wanted
to become an artist after having seen
Moulin Rouge, but what have you now is
enhanced fucking cartoons.
PD: How often do you paint?
JH: I probably paint, if I am lucky, about
half the week - call it work, it’s like being
a kid all the time isn’t it? It’s hardly work.
PD: How many paintings do you paint
a year?
JH: More in the past, but probably,
I honestly don’t know, but in the
region of fifty to seventy a year. I have
gaps because we go to Jamaica and
Spain usually twice a year. I’ll show
you something. When I travel, in the
evenings I do little drawings in case there
is anything I can use and a lot of these
are figurative and were done on trips to
Bali. I also have this book in which I do
drawings of all the paintings that I do
and I always put on the completion date,
size and titles. If they have got a secretary
who is no fucking good they might get
one or two things wrong but they don’t
get all fucking three wrong.
PD: You would rather do that than take
a picture?
JH: Yes, I would in a way, I also take
photos but on the whole this is a good
confirmation. So this book is from
Jamaica in 2009 and you can see from
the dates I had a month off
from painting.
PD: How has Jamaica affected
your work?
JH: Oh hugely, massively, all the tropics
have. I first went to Jamaica in 1969
when I was on my way to the Sao Paolo
Biennale. I was going long before I met
my wife Beverley.
PD: Were you going there for the
Rastafarian experience?
JH: For the birds, fruit, sun and the
amazing light big skies and violent
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rain. The people are lively and funny
and the complete opposite of anything
English. Can you imagine a Poinsettia,
you know the little pot plants around at
Christmas, well can you imagine one
the size of a fucking oak tree that’s got a
parasite tree growing on it that’s orange
or purple. Humming birds, butterflies,
lizards and bougainvillea all year round,
all different shades of purple and pink.
There is a drama to the tropics. Here is
a painting I painted for a television crew
and I finished it in one go. I didn’t think
I would but I did and that is rare. I get
influenced a lot by what I am reading.
PD: Why do you use acrylics and have
you abandoned oil?
JH: I found that acrylic is more flexible
than oil and dries quickly. Painting and
sculpture of whatever cultures are ancient
languages, they take time to be learnt.
Painting is a craft that can occasionally
become art, it is a slow learned language
and can take years to develop and like
most languages it is better to start young
as art is always changing. Art and the
making of it and the performance are
closely related to music. As I said earlier
it’s making new hybrids. I have often
said when artists of the third world begin
to make art the way they make music
then we are all fucked. I recognise this in
South Africa.
The artists are so gifted but don’t know
what to do. They know a little about
Western influences and a little about
their own history. There is no driving
force so they imitate. There is no market
so they are bound to survive through
craft, but the strength, energy and
resilience of the people won’t go away.
Having said that who knows where
art can come from but I doubt it can
generally grow in the art market of the
West. We live in silly times when people
don’t know the difference between Billy
Holliday and Girls Aloud.
PD: What about the significance
of colour?
JH: I just leave that to the making of
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FEATURE
it. I have said this before, colour is like
love – you don’t choose it, it chooses
you. Structure like you were saying is the
problem, to define structures to hang on
to. But these paintings have become less
and less structured.
PD: There is more space in the
backgrounds now.
JH: I am trying to make areas where
your eye can explore different galaxies,
movements and rhythms. It is just
daydreaming, being a kid everyday, not
a work ethic. It is multi-faceted. I have
always said that painting is killer sport
because when you fail you kind of die.
It is that intense, but you have to play
with the paint and let it go its own
way and then check it. I hate to lose a
painting.
PD: In New York at the moment there is
a resurgence of minimal reductions.
JH: Oh fuck me!
PD: The search and need for concrete
simplicity, which I find stylish and
depressing.
JH: Yes, that’s Donald Judd, he was a
critic you know? Some critics thought
well, I am cleverer than these bastards
why don’t I become an artist. I am better
educated but what they lacked was touch,
feel, and sensuality of surface and passion.
You see those Don Judd’s stacked up like
shelves. To me they are nothing. I am
tired of these stunters. Some clown who
rolled up some pathetic snowman in the
square here photographed it and got it
in all the newspapers. He did them all
around London - so fucking what? What
is that? Pathetic. You were talking about
form and how to use colour and I agree
with you it is a crucial thing but when
you look at that great Robert Smithson
spiral that they did with bulldozers, trucks
and helicopters and also the Richard
Long lines in the desert, if you transfer
the form to canvas it is just a fucking line.
That is all it is. They are just spirals, lines
and circles.
PD: Isn’t there a sensibility in those
works that is drawing your attention to
the natural context? Isn’t the organizing
of the landscape appealing to the
English romantic?
JH: To me it is very elementary.
PD: These environmental installations
are designed and don’t come out of the
material, they are on a scale where they
can’t emerge.
JH: To put a single line, a rectangle,
or two blues on a canvas has been done
before. The precursors of this were
people like Diebenkorn. You couldn’t
find a hole in a Diebenkorn. There was
Ludwig Sander and Alan Green. They
all did geometric painting. People have
forgotten this. They were quite humble
and not really recognised.
PD: So where do you think we are now
with abstract painting?
JH: I know there is a lot of Hoyland’s
creeping into catalogues – very bad ones.
I mean mine are about as bad as you
can get, but they are worse. I don’t go
to galleries much but I would like to go
to that Picasso show at The Gagosian
Gallery, but I know I have to summon up
the moral fibre to go there.
PD: Have you seen the Soulages show at
Bernard Jacobson’s?
JH: I missed the opening because it
was like a football match there and it
was a hot night. I want to see Howard
Hodgkin’s show.
PD: What do you think of his work?
JH: I think he has certainly gone off. In
the 1960s and 1970s he was treading
a lonely path trying to find a synthesis
of Matisse’s Moroccans and Indian
miniatures, with the rest of it. He had
a nice colour sense. He was really
struggling and some of them did take
years, then he gradually got a formula.
Anyway, there is no wild in art anymore.
You have got to be wild to be an artist.
I was watching a programme the other
night on Caravaggio. Now he was wild!
PAGE 27/78
Its About Time - Peter Dickenson
2001
Oil and phosphorescence on canvas
(600 x 80 cm)
Courtesy of the artist
Photographed by Nick Smith