Proud to be made in Sheffield
Wiz Patterson-Kelly of John Hoyland’s estate says of the artist: “He’d be so happy this exhibition was in Sheffield. He really loved the place.” The painter was born in the city in 1934 to a working class family and was encouraged from an early age to pursue his artistic leanings. “His mum encouraged him to start drawing and painting in the first place when he was really little,” says Patterson-Kelly.
“In the beginning I think it was just a way of staying up late, so he didn’t get sent to bed by his dad. His mum would say, ‘leave John alone, he’s busy, he’s drawing.’” Hoyland died in 2011, aged
76, with his mother following just a week later. The paintings he made in his final years are now featured in a major exhibition – John Hoyland: The Last Paintings – at Sheffield’s Millennium Gallery. Hoyland was often thought of as an abstract expressionist; artist Damien Hirst has said of Hoyland that he is “by far the greatest British abstract painter. John Hoyland was an artist who was never afraid to push the boundaries. His paintings always feel like a massive celebration of life to me.”
However, Patterson-Kelly suggests Hoyland was keen to avoid labelling from early on and his work – including the paintings featured in this posthumous exhibition – display much more than abstraction. “Right from when he was at college he was trying to do something different
An exhibition pays homage to steel city artist John Hoyland. Daniel Dylan Wray reports. Main pictures: Jonathan Gawthorpe
with abstract art,” she says. “But he was pigeonholed for years. Even in his obituaries, they said that he was Britain’s greatest abstract artist but he didn’t like to be called an abstract artist, as he was always developing his art practice. As soon as he was pigeon-holed somewhere he would fight to break out of it. Every decade of his work, you see a massive step in a different direction, and that was partly influenced by artists that were influencing him, and his travels, but also partly because he was always pushing himself out of those labels and trying to do something new.”
Patterson-Kelly argues that it would have actually made life a lot easier for Hoyland had he embraced these kinds of labelling, rather than his trajectory of ceaseless reinvention. “It actually cost his career dearly at certain times,” she says.
“If he’d stuck in a pigeon-hole, where everyone knew where his work was, he probably would have been a very wealthy man and could have played it safe but he never did that. He always tried to do something different.”
Hoyland also took his roots with him into the art world, eschewing the pomp and pretension that can often come with it. “That John was born and grew up in Sheffield was obviously a key thing,” Patterson-Kelly says. “It shaped who he was. He didn’t come from money as a lot of the other artists he knew did and he never forgot those roots. He funded a scholarship at the University of the Arts in London for years to pay for people to study. He would always help anyone that came to him, any students that were having a hard time. He kind of kicked against the establishment a bit because of his early years as well. The establishment was quite down on people without means, people from working class backgrounds, and he always felt that they didn’t help at all.”
However, it was a hitchhiking trip to France as a young man and the bright, vibrant colours he saw that awoke his sensibilities as an artist and gave him a desire to move on. “He was told there were only a couple of jobs that he was likely to ever get in Sheffield,” Patterson-Kelly says. “Most of his friends ended up working in industry. He just didn’t want that. The trip to France really expanded his horizons and he decided that he didn’t want to stay in Sheffield forever.”
Success was soon to follow him. Leaving Sheffield in 1956 with little knowledge of contemporary abstract art, he quickly became swept up in a period of great artistic change. Hoyland’s knowledge of modern European art merged with a love of American abstract expressionism, which resulted in a series of abstract paintings for his diploma show in
1960. These audacious works so shocked
the then-president of the RA, Sir Charles Wheeler, that they were ordered down from the walls.
By the mid-1960s Hoyland had met many of the pioneering abstract expressionists, such as Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Helen Frankenthaler. Robert Motherwell would become a lifelong friend. Hoyland was included in the influential Situation group exhibitions and was selected as one of Bryan Robertson’s New Generation artists at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1964. From here, his career continued on the ascent with his first institutional solo show in
1967 at the Whitechapel, where he presented a body of work critic Mel Gooding referred to as “an achievement in scale and energy, sharpness of definition and expressive power unmatched by any of his contemporaries, and unparalleled in modern British painting.”
The work featured in his posthumous exhibition comes from a period in his life when he knew he was ill – he’d had heart surgery in 2008.
“The impact of this period was profound,” says Patterson-Kelly. “He’d always been so energetic and full of life and he really did live his life, but he’d lost several friends and a lot of these late paintings were eulogies to close friends like Patrick Caulfield. And then when he became ill, it really hit him. After his surgery he says he had this distinct sharpening of the senses, where he realised his mortality was really hitting like a sledgehammer. It kind of pushed this sudden creative burst of energy. He made an awful lot of paintings after that and in a very short space of time.”
The work captures this end period of someone’s life but through the eyes of someone who was more reflective and celebratory than glum and fated. “They’re really contemplative paintings,” she says. “But they’re not downbeat, they’re not depressing or melancholic, they’re thoughtful – really bursting with life. They’re really quite fantastic paintings, celebrating life, and also mourning the loss of things – they are about the cycle of life, really. I think that whole period of his life was about reflection but also looking at a celebration of life and the positivity of life and its endless cycle. It was very forward-looking and very optimistic. There are moments of melancholy but I think as a body of work, it’s incredibly optimistic.”
For Patterson-Kelly, who has catalogued over 3,000 paintings of Hoyland’s, feels his later work is important. “This body of work really is the culmination of all of his experience and everything that he distilled over all of those years of his career,” she says. “For me, looking at that body of work, he knew exactly what he was doing and what he was working towards, right down to his final painting. It’s just so sad that he can’t be here to see this work being presented like this but it’s just so lovely for Sheffield to have this amazing selection. He very much felt like a Sheffield man.”
■ John Hoyland: The Last Paintings, Millennium Galllery, Sheffield, until
October 10.