‘EXPERIENCING LANDSCAPE’: Solo show Sarum College, Salisbury 2019

TALKING ABOUT ‘EXPERIENCING LANDSCAPE’ AT THE PRIVATE VIEW

There is a new, lavish book on contemporary landscape painting, admittedly a bit dominated by the North American perspective (Landscape Painting Now: From PoP Abstraction to New Romanticism Ed. Todd Bradway, Thames & Hudson, London 2019). In it Barry Schwabsky, the US art critic sees contemporary landscape painting as mirroring the complicated vistas we face in the world.

 My painting practice, which is reflected in the 50 or so images scattered through Sarum College, is certainly one of fragments and different perspectives. Whatever lies beyond post-modernity. Some of my paintings are more clearly within the landscape tradition, with echoes of the romantic sublime, others are of a detail. I do not try to portray with detailed realism. Interesting that Schwabsky notes the more complete the resemblance, the more poignant the disconnection between image and reality. What I am doing is inviting the viewer to pay attention to the world – offering a moment of connection or recognition, often of a particular landscape.

John Walker the British Abstract painter who lives in the US came to Messums Wiltshire earlier this year. He said he had lived in Maine 10-15 years before he painted it: ‘I had to see beyond the prettiness and charm to the mud’. For me (and it may be my garden design background) the mud underfoot can be rather beautiful. Desert Floor in the refectory is not as abstract as it looks but a serious representation of what was under my feet in the American desert.  If you look closely on one panel you will see the footprint or slot of a deer. Footfall (halfway down the corridor) is an image of a path in the Alps…you certainly have to look where you put your feet on the high mountain paths.

 One recurring theme, (common to many artists) is the effect of light in the landscape, both as a phenomenon and also as a symbol of hope. The Mountain Refuge Series upstairs started with the experience of going into a dark hut – which had a window overlooking the steep mountainside. The point was not to paint the view, (which was stupendous) but to capture the revelation of colour and light outside. Light is not always benign…it can be pitiless. Two of the Mountain Refuge series (which can be identified by their more sombre palette) relate to the windows in the North Face of the Eiger. In the early 20th century would-be rescuers watched helplessly as a climber died before their eyes on the other side of the window.

 But light is also a symbol of hope and means of growth.  This May’s visit to the Alps saw varied weather and a very late spring. In the paintings in the downstairs corridor you can see something of the theme which dominated that visit… interstices or cracks and fissures in the landscape, between clouds, between ice, as dawn was breaking.

 In my fragmentary approach to landscape I do sometimes reference environmental issues, usually fairly subtly…through melting ice, the interaction between water and the built environment in some of the images upstairs. The large Flower Market paintings are not the traditional striped tulip fields from an aerial perspective but the landscape brought indoors… the rows of cut flowers at Covent Garden Flower Market, the occasional dissonant colour of out of season forced plants, the grey dust of water depletion. Very occasionally the social or political point is sharper. The two Homecoming paintings upstairs point to the refugee losing home and means of support to fire… and returning to find ash. Yesterday in the cathedral at a lecture on commemoration and public art, Sandy Nairne (former director of the National Portrait Gallery) in answering questions referred to a commemoration being so powerful it overflowed the original event and became more widely significant. It is sobering that I cannot remember which particular disaster provoked those paintings… the theme persists.

 I haven’t talked about colour…I love colour…and you can see the distinctive colours of particular landscapes are powerful. My studio was red/orange for almost a year after our trip to the American desert. I hope you will enjoy it.

 Thank you again for coming. Please grab a leaflet. It has a plan which will help you find your way round the exhibition…. something of a treasure hunt in this very hospitable building. 

Joy Hillyer

‘BORDERS’: SOLO EXHIBITION AT WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL 2018

 The Royal Academy’s 2016 exhibition, ‘Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse’ exposed the difficulties of depicting gardens. Attempting to paint a wide expanse can lead to fussy, distracting paintings with isolated patches of colour competing for our attention. Taking a close-up view, looking down at a border, often results in an unsatisfying compromise between the demands of the botanical and the pictorial. 

 Joy Hillyer draws on her background in garden design to overcome these problems. Combining the overhead plan view with the vertical picture plane allows her to evoke the horticultural landscape without adhering to the rules of naturalistic depiction. This more abstract approach liberates her colours and forms, allowing the artist to focus on geometric and chromatic relationships, bringing strength and resolution to her compositions.

In the Flower Market series a highly contrived interaction between nature and humanity is the unseen backdrop to the ranks of flowers at New Covent Garden Market, where Hillyer found inspiration in the intense colour and loose geometry of the scene.

 In this way, works that might appear purely abstract are built upon an intensely thoughtful approach to landscape and the built environment. In Border, Hillyer considers the progression of the seasons within the contrived beauty of a garden. Knowing how difficult it is to paint whole banks of flowers without a fussy or overwhelming outcome, she has considered ‘border’ as boundary, with almost solid masses of intense colour contrasting with delicate decay and muted tones, in a frieze-like format.

In Garden Props the backdrop is again the interaction between nature and humanity. In this image there is a hint of the garden as theatre.

Steve Wright

stevewrightart.com

Curator’s Introduction to ‘LIMINAL’: SOLO EXHIBITION OF PAINTINGS, WESTMINSTER ABBEY 2018

“Are your paintings figurative or abstract?” remains one of the questions most frequently asked of artists. For Joy Hillyer, the question is pertinent but comes without an easy answer.

To understand why, we should turn to the carefully-chosen title of this exhibition: ‘Liminal’ refers to a position occupying or traversing both sides of a boundary, neither one side nor the other. Evading easy classification as ‘abstract’ or ‘figurative’, Hillyer’s rich and powerful paintings draw us up to the margins of what can be categorised.

It does make sense to regard Hillyer as an artist who abstracts from nature. All of the works in show derive from specific places which the artist has experienced at first hand. 2017 provided a very rich source of inspiration, as she joined her husband on a sabbatical tour that included Hong Kong, Florida and Utah. The degree to which the source image has been changed through the act of painting varies considerably, according to the artist’s intentions for each piece. Working in her studio, distanced spatially and temporally from her original subject, Hillyer can decide which aspects of the landscape need to remain recognisable – and which do not.

The three magnificent panels that make up “Edge” perhaps best illustrate how we can understand the liminality of these paintings. The experience of standing on hot red earth above a canyon, its steep sides plunging vertiginously towards deep blue water, the desert floor beyond, stretching to a far horizon – is here evoked more powerfully than could have been achieved through a more literal depiction of the site.

By contrast, the fifteen panels comprising “Desert Floor” may be taken at first glance as a piece of minimalist abstraction. In fact, they are rather closer to the physical appearance of the landscape than “Edge” each derives from a photograph taken by the artist of the ground beneath her feet as she walked through the Arizona and Utah desert. In one panel, the overlapping footprints of visitors are faithfully reproduced using an intricate hand-cut stencil. It could hardly be closer to the terrain that inspired it.

In these paintings, Hillyer walks the tightrope between figuration and abstraction, suggesting that the liminal may be the most exciting place for an artist to be.

Steve Wright  www.stevewrightart.com

CURATOR'S INTRODUCTION TO 'COUNTERPOINT': Solo exhibition of paintings  AT WESTMINSTER ABBEY 2016

Most painters, whether figurative or abstract, modern or traditional, strive towards a common goal: to achieve in each work a sense of resolution. The painting is finished when all its elements seem held in a balanced relationship. This has led many artists and educators to believe that consistency of brushstroke and a limited palette of harmonious colours is the only recipe for a successful painting. It may actually be a recipe for dullness: homogeneity is not the same as completeness.

In visual terms, we may understand counterpoint as emphasis through contrast. Exciting painters breathe life into their paintings though contrasts of shape, colour, texture and meaning. Their resolution then becomes more difficult and Joy Hillyer’s achievement is to have succeeded in combining very different elements into a whole, without losing a sense of tension.

In the series Thames Steps, the solidity and sharpness of stone form a counterpoint to the dynamic fluidity of water and spray. Two elements of an urban landscape emphasise the interaction of the man-made and the natural. This theme is developed in the Flower Market series. A highly contrived interaction between nature and humanity is the unseen backdrop to the ranks of flowers at New Covent Garden Market, where Hillyer found inspiration in the intense colour and loose geometry of the scene.

In this way, works that might appear purely abstract are built upon an intensely thoughtful approach to landscape and the built environment. In Border, Hillyer considers the progression of the seasons within the contrived beauty of a garden. Knowing how difficult it is to paint whole banks of flowers without a fussy or overwhelming outcome, she has considered ‘border’ as boundary, with almost solid masses of intense colour contrasting with delicate decay and muted tones, in a frieze-like format.

The core subject of this exhibition is landscape and our interaction with it, whether this is the lighting of fires among nocturnal Alpine landscapes or the cultivation of flowers in the most unlikely places. It is an exhibition of contrasts, where the small-scale acts as a counterpoint to the vast, the organic to the geometric, the hard to the soft, the dark to the light.

 Steve Wright  www.stevewrightart.com

CURATOR’S INTRODUCTION to 'WHEN OUR EYES SEE FURTHER THAN OUR HANDS CAN REACH'*: SOLO EXHIBITION AT WESTMINSTER ABBEY 2015

To understand and appreciate Joy Hillyer’s paintings we need to think beyond any straightforward idea of what a painting is. Many of the works exhibited here derive from specific landscapes, so we might assume that Hillyer paints a personal vision of what is physically present. Look a little further…

 To the serious painter, the act of painting is almost impossible. It is a reaching beyond what one sees, towards something un-graspable and not yet known. It is found, writes painter Peter Doig, ‘between the actuality of the scene and something that is in your head’.

 Consider ‘The Clock Tower’, a key painting in this exhibition. In a literal sense, the eye sees further because it’s based on the view up into the high stairwell of the Palace of Westminster’s Elizabeth Tower. Translating this vision into paint required a prolonged struggle, as strong spiral shapes and dark colours gave way to softer, brighter forms, nebulous and recessive. In pushing it further, Hillyer transformed the painting into something unforeseen and new, yet closer in essence to what first inspired her. It’s not a picture of something but a painting that reaches towards something…

 The cultural and intellectual conditions under which a contemporary painter works aren’t really a matter of choice. Our postmodern inheritance is sceptical and fragmentary, making it difficult, even undesirable, to create works of contented wholeness. There is edge to these paintings because they are composed of fragments of image, thought and feeling that refuse to settle comfortably down.

  ‘Nonet’ embodies these conditions in impressive form: moved by the alpine landscape of the Bernese Oberland, Hillyer created nine panels, each relating to an aspect of the scene, whether a sudden break in the clouds or the man-made forms of sluice gate and dredger. ‘Nonet’ is a contemporary re-imagining of the Romantic Sublime, fractured yet magnificent in its scale and strength.

 So, look for the fragments and consider what the whole might be. Hillyer’s practice is not about one thing, nor should it be: she brings her keen eye and intelligence to various aspects of the world that refuse to be ignored. Underlying her paintings, and extending beyond them, there are themes of:

 the mystery of the natural world and its relationship to the built environment

the suffering of the homeless, the refugee, the outsider

the insanity of war, the helplessness of commemoration

light and its shadow

Steve Wright www.stevewrightart.com