View 1979

John Hoyland made this print, "View," sometime in his career, with what looks like confident, broad strokes. The making is right there on the surface. The yellow ground hums with horizontal energy, setting the stage for these encounters between colors. Look how Hoyland layers a stack of purple blocks over the warm field, only to interrupt them with a column of feverish reds and oranges. There's a real sense of immediacy – as if he's wrestling with the colors and shapes, trying to find that sweet spot where everything just clicks. Hoyland always struck me as a kind of colour-scientist, always experimenting. Like his contemporary, Howard Hodgkin, there's a love of Matisse and a sense that art can be both serious and playful. "View" feels like just that - a playful experiment that we can look at over and over.