©Ridinghouse,

1 Hoyland in conversation with Gary Wragg, late 1970s. Sam Cornish (ed), Constant Within the Change: Gary Wragg: Five Decades of Paintings, A Comprehensive Catalogue, Sansom & Co. Ltd, Bristol, 2014, vol.1, p.63.

2 John Hoyland, ‘Brian Fielding Obituary’, The Independent, 30 May 1986. ‘Elegies’ include: Master Weaver (Homage to Bryan Robertson) (2002, p.68); Elegy (for Bryan Robertson) (2003, p.73); Elegy (for Terry Frost) (2003, p.76); Poem for Piero (2007, p.111); Souvenir (for Patrick C) (2006, p.93), and also perhaps inspired by Caulfield’s death, Love and Grief (2006, fig.9); dedicated to Denis Bowen, Blue Moon (2006); to Clifford Pugh, Eyes That Dream (Clifford Dies) (2008) and Goodbye (2008, p.113). ‘Letters’ include: Letter to Henri (1995); Letter to Vincent (2006, p.99); Letter to Chaim (2006, p.101). For more about the paintings dedicated to Vincent van Gogh see pp.40–49. There were two further ‘Letters’, neither elegiac: Letter to Sam (2006), to the collector of Hoyland’s paintings Sam Lurie, and Letter to RM (2006), likely dedicated to Renate Motherwell, the wife of Robert Motherwell.

3 ‘John Hoyland in Conversation with Peter Dickinson’, Turps Banana, Winter 2010, p.24.

4 The other two were Arthur B. Carles and Bradley Walker Tomlin. Memoria in Aeternum is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Hoyland would very likely have known the painting from his time living in New York and from curating a show of Hofmann’s late work at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1988.

5 ‘Happy Birthday’, The Times, 12 October 2009.

6 Sometimes these signs are joined by coded messages, an idea the younger Hoyland would probably have rejected. His Letter to Chaim (p.101) contains a thin green line that references a stray thread in Soutine’s Carcass of Beef (1925).

7 Lucien Stryk, The Awakened Self: Encounters with Zen, Kodansha USA Inc., New York, 1995. Ian Ritchie in John Hoyland: Mysteries, exhibition catalogue, Beaux Arts, London, 2011, pp.43–44, noted Hoyland’s highlighted phrases from Stryk’s book.

with more abstract structures, with no clear distinction, much less a hierarchy between the two. Suns, moons, rivers or waterfalls of colour, occasionally schematic signs for birds or people, are the echoes of a much more pervasive abstract-figuration he had explored from the mid-1990s to just past the millennium.6 Hoyland’s last paintings are vigorous and exuberant, filled with flashes of light and colour, stylish, sometimes provocatively lurid; at their best they are exhilarating.

Moon in the Water (fig.2 and p.197) was the last of the ‘Mysteries’, painted in March 2011, four months before his death. Its title was taken from a death-poem by the nineteenth-century Japanese Zen master Gizan, published in a book Hoyland owned by Lucien Stryk, a poet and promoter of Zen.7

Coming and going, life and death: A thousand hamlets, a million houses. Don’t you get the point?

Moon in the water, blossom in the sky.

Such poems were written by Zen masters to guide their disciples after their deaths. The attraction for an artist confronting mortality is clear, even if Hoyland did not have an extensive philosophical engagement with Zen. We can imagine he dipped into the text in search of a resonant image or idea, taking what he needed for his own purposes, extending his feelings for the mysteries of life and its end, and finding phrases that would vibrate alongside his paintings.

Moon in the Water is sombre and meditative without lapsing into melancholy. As clarified as it is tenebrous, its darkness is the setting for a radiance that is both generally spread across its surface and specifically concentrated in sparks of yellow and a glowing red orb. It encompasses a vast, potentially infinite expanse but renders this with immediacy, even intimacy. There is a readily appreciable if ultimately unfathomable connection between Gizan’s words and Hoyland’s image. Yet the succeeding phrase – ‘blossom in the sky’ – has the potential for an even more direct link with Hoyland’s late works, well describing their garlands of multicoloured marks dancing against intergalactic voids. The shining quiet of Hoyland’s last painting leaves these final words of Gizan’s poem poignantly unsaid.

Sam Cornish