20.5.74 1974

John Hoyland made this painting, 20.5.74, sometime in 1974, probably in a studio somewhere, with brushes and luscious paint. There's this dominant orangey-terracotta color, like sun-baked earth, but then that border! It's like he couldn't quite decide where the edge was, so he kept adding these stripes of pink and lavender, these little dribbles and drabs. I wonder if he was thinking about Rothko, those hazy rectangles floating on the canvas, but then decided to add a hard edge, like a window frame. You can almost feel him wrestling with the paint, pushing it around, scraping it off, until it felt just right. I bet he was listening to music while he was painting, maybe some jazz or blues, something with a lot of soul. All that shifting around, that's like a visual conversation that painters have with each other, across time.