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拍品專文
In 1940, Ivon Hitchens and his family escaped wartime London and moved to Lavington Common near Petworth in Sussex. Hitchens had bought the six acres of Sussex woodland the year before, as somewhere peaceful he could paint away from the city. They called their home Greenleaves; at first they lived in a caravan in the woods but over the decades it grew with the addition of a studio, and later a house. Hitchens found endless inspiration in his seasonally-changing habitat.
Landscape, Spaces of Woods and Hills demonstrates how, during the 1960s, Hitchens began to move towards a style of work with a basis in total abstraction. This approach shifted and varied between works as some continue to cling to the visual representation of their subject and others of the same period are almost entirely composed of brushstrokes and planes of colour. Peter Khoroche proposed the question of Hitchens’ stylistic choices: ‘how far could a picture develop away from nature, so as to give aesthetic pleasure in its own right without snapping the life-giving umbilical chord that connects it with nature’ (P. Khoroche, Ivon Hitchens, Aldershot, 2007, p. 152.).
In the present work, Hitchens has typically highlighted and picked out details of the landscape with white lines of paint. Hitchens would often leave areas of primed canvas unpainted in order to further heighten the painted areas, a technique which can be seen in the present work. As Hitchens himself said, 'the white areas or lines of white canvas are to provide channels isolating the areas of paint so that these can be felt relatively to each other in their shape, area, weight and meaning ... The intention is that the spectator's eye can travel along these areas ... over the picture surface instead of being engulfed or drowned in a morass of paint representing or aping realism' (see P. Khoroche, Ivon Hitchens, London, 1990, p. 86). Hitchens' method of creating the illusion of spatial depth in his paintings without applying conventional perspective demonstrates his concern with abstraction and a very modern response to his surroundings.
In 1963 a major retrospective of Hitchens’ work was arranged by the Arts Council at the Tate Gallery, London.
Landscape, Spaces of Woods and Hills demonstrates how, during the 1960s, Hitchens began to move towards a style of work with a basis in total abstraction. This approach shifted and varied between works as some continue to cling to the visual representation of their subject and others of the same period are almost entirely composed of brushstrokes and planes of colour. Peter Khoroche proposed the question of Hitchens’ stylistic choices: ‘how far could a picture develop away from nature, so as to give aesthetic pleasure in its own right without snapping the life-giving umbilical chord that connects it with nature’ (P. Khoroche, Ivon Hitchens, Aldershot, 2007, p. 152.).
In the present work, Hitchens has typically highlighted and picked out details of the landscape with white lines of paint. Hitchens would often leave areas of primed canvas unpainted in order to further heighten the painted areas, a technique which can be seen in the present work. As Hitchens himself said, 'the white areas or lines of white canvas are to provide channels isolating the areas of paint so that these can be felt relatively to each other in their shape, area, weight and meaning ... The intention is that the spectator's eye can travel along these areas ... over the picture surface instead of being engulfed or drowned in a morass of paint representing or aping realism' (see P. Khoroche, Ivon Hitchens, London, 1990, p. 86). Hitchens' method of creating the illusion of spatial depth in his paintings without applying conventional perspective demonstrates his concern with abstraction and a very modern response to his surroundings.
In 1963 a major retrospective of Hitchens’ work was arranged by the Arts Council at the Tate Gallery, London.