John Hoyland - The Stain Paintings
Through his ties with leading modernists on both sides of the Atlantic, Hoyland is a pivotal figure in 20th-century abstraction
and The Stain Paintings from 1964 -1967 are his most prized, trophy works. These large canvases are filled with an
extraordinary light and energy and represent the pinnacle of his achievement; great blocks of colour float as if in space.
“God! Your’re painting real paintings!!” said Helen Frankenthaler in 1965 on a visit to his Primrose Hill studio.
The paintings were made between Hoyland’s 1964 trip to New York and his first major retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in the spring of 1967. Inspired by interactions and studio visits with American Abstract Expressionists,including Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, Hoyland increased the scale of his pictures and moved exclusively to acrylic paint rather than oil. He began to stain his paintings with acrylics, as well as to apply pigment with brushes and rollers, creating varied edges, opacities and surfaces across his works. The paintings are
dominated by large geometric shapes, but through his use of acrylics, Hoyland maintained a soft edge, with colours overlapping or seeping into each other and creating halo-like effects, evocative of works by Rothko.