Ivon Hitchens 1893-1979
Blue and Red Woods
oil on canvas
20½ x 41½ ins
signed lower left 'Hitchens' signed, titled and dated verso 'Blue and Red Woods 1962 by Ivon Hitchens, Greenleaves, Petworth, Sussex'

Provenance
Mrs Hirst

Exhibited
Waddington Galleries, London



Although unsigned and undated, this highly characteristic landscape by Ivon Hitchens would, on stylistic grounds, appear to date from c1957/8, a period when his paintings begin to take on an even more brilliant colouring of pinky-reds, golds and blues as well as a more broken paint-surface in which areas of primed white canvas run between and off-set the colour-forms of the landscape. As Hitchens himself wrote of this stylistic device. 'The intention is that the spectator’s eye can travel along these areas, from ‘Floe to floe,’ over the picture surface instead of being engulfed or drowned in a morass of paint representing or aping realism'. In a work like this it certainly helps to create a dynamic, rippling movement laterally across the surface of the canvas as well as emphasising the structure and solidity of the coloured pigment. In addition it creates a variety of textures along the paint-edges next to the white ground that helped to convey the nuances of the landscape itself. The final effect is to make a painting like this among the most abstract work Hitchens was to produce, placing him, at this time, among the most highly regarded of avant-garde British painters - in 1956 he had represented Britain at the Venice Biennale.

For all its abstract qualities however, it would have been painted, as all Hitchen’s work was, largely in front of the motif itself, most probably of a landscape close to the artist’s home at Lavington Common, near Petworth in West Sussex. This 'quiet intent, alert poet'- the painter Patrick Heron’s vivid description of him - then abstracts directly from nature, with colour standing for light and light for space, creating rhythms and harmonies, or as he put it 'a visual music', pictures, which 'are painted to be ‘listened’ to'.