Roger Hilton 1911-1975
November, 1964
oil on canvas
19 x 15 ins
signed and titled verso ?Hilton April ?64?

Provenance
Private Collection UK



Painted in the year Roger Hilton was selected to represent Britain at the XXXll Venice Biennale, April 1964 is highly characteristic of the tough, spare style of figurative painting Hilton had been evolving from the late 1950s onwards after he had gone to live and work in West Cornwall. Painting in a studio overlooking Newlyn Harbour, Hilton had slowly moved away from the often uncompromisingly abstract style he had developed c. 1952/3 in response to Mondrian’s painting, towards work that conveyed much stronger suggestions of the visible world and of the resonant Cornish landscape in particular. In this painting there is the clear depiction of a horizon line - sky and shore - on which rests the vigorously drawn crescent shape of a boat (often a surrogate for the female figure that appears in his work with such frequency at this time) and, in the foreground, the rough mass of a rock form. This is not a painting about external descriptions, however, but rather an internal resolution of the artist’s passionate idea and the medium of paint itself or, as he so eloquently puts it 'an attempt to exteriorise one’s sensations and feelings, to give them form'.