Ridinghouse,2021

bursting and bleeding, surrounded by white star spots. This night sky (see pp.62–63) is presented to us as a zone of pictorial creation, whose independent life is manifested in the streaks, blobs, washes, spirals, splats and smudges of colour that mingle, explode and traverse the pictorial field, while seemingly ‘unknowing’ gestures, brushmarks and tube-squeezings of paint metamorphose into semi-figurative but indecipherable signs of life.

Symbolism

Bouquet for Vincent is a symbolist abstraction that plays with a flux of associations between the two aspects of its title – the bunch of flowers and nature, and the memories that have accrued to an emblematic artist from the past – through shifting colours, equivocal forms and spatial ambiances that suggest depths in and beyond the opaque ground and parameters of the canvas.13 The evocation of mystery, the provocation of heightened states of consciousness and the experimental quest for forms suitable to the representation of an indivisible world are the foundational features of the largely marginalised artistic tradition of Symbolist modernism. In fin-de-siècle France, Van Gogh was viewed as a leading representative of this new aesthetic, alongside Gauguin and another important, hitherto unnoticed, predecessor for Hoyland, the revered Symbolist artist Odilon Redon. Bouquet for Vincent summons up the otherworldly, hybrid cell/star/eye/flower apparitions that populate Redon’s charcoal drawings as well as the chromatic pleasure of his many floral bouquets in pastel and oil paint (fig.34). Among Hoyland’s notebook jottings, we find a quote from Redon on ‘the logic of the visible in service of the invisible’, suggesting Hoyland’s sympathy for the Symbolist master’s radiant colourism and his evocative merger between naturalism and visual metaphors of spiritual transcendence.14

Although seen as a minor genre, flower painting supplied a motif rich with potential for chromatic investigations, experiments in textured brushwork, decorative form and emotive symbolism. Redon was ‘a painter of flowers as they are seen in dreams’.15 Van Gogh’s A Memory of the Garden (Etten and Nuenen) (1888) was eloquently described by the artist as an example of his attempt to move away from what ‘really exists’ and towards ‘the ideal as it might result from my abstract studies’ by the means of visionary memory and poetic arrangements of colour and meandering line.16 In January 1890 art critic and poet Albert Aurier published the first major study of Van Gogh and his paintings. Aurier described the artist as an ‘exalted believer, a devourer of beautiful utopias living on ideas and on dreams’, whose expressive manipulation of line, colour and form conjoined the ideal and the sacred to the real through the symbols of the sun and ‘that vegetal heavenly body, the sumptuous sunflower’.17

From 2006 onwards, Hoyland’s emotional testimony to everything ‘Vincent’ symbolised, and his heightened expression of time consciousness, are condensed into the motif of the primal circle or black sun, painted in wavering, dripping