Derek Hirst; painter (lovely)
Hyfler/Rosner
25 May 2006
Norbert Lynton
Derek Hirst
Artist of 'Place' - first Yorkshire, then Sussex, Andalusia,
Morocco, the Far East and Japan
http://www.artnet.com/artwork/424266027/derek-hirst-facade-no-2.html
http://flatrock.org.nz/topics/art_of_playing_cards/eight_of_hearts.htm
http://www.gac.culture.gov.uk/search/Object.asp?object_key=28359
Yorkshire has produced several important modern artists.
Some of these have become famous, the subjects of books and
exhibitions, of media attention. Some have remained
art-world properties, admired and sustained by faithful
galleries, by friends who were often artists or critics, and
by discriminating collectors who fall in love with the work
and come to know and admire the artist. Derek Hirst was a
fine example of this sort. There are many who needed a new
Hirst now and again, and, whenever possible, personal
contact with the man himself.
He was, indeed, an amazing man, charged with incredible
energy. He was diagnosed as having cancer in 1970. A major
operation followed in 1976. Some time after that he was
declared clear, but the disease returned in 1998 and from
that time on he needed several operations. Recently
developed lung cancer carried him off. So Hirst was long
beleaguered by ill-health. But he seemed indomitable - the
Derek Hirst one met was alert and alive beyond all possible
expectation.
Hirst's mother, he told me, was a Romany; his father an
agricultural labourer. They met, one imagines, in a field
near Doncaster and married soon after. Derek was born in
Doncaster. He was a bright schoolboy. A scholarship to
Doncaster Grammar School led to his being marked out for
Oxbridge. He remembered being called "Derek" by his stern
headmaster, who then proceeded to embrace the boy in
expectation of his academic success and the school's greater
glory. But there was also a wise art master, who guided
Derek's first efforts in serious drawing and painting and
showed him reproductions (in the few books then available)
of modern art.
Aged 16, Derek Hirst entered Doncaster Art School, where he
met his future wife, Ellen, a Dane. After two years he moved
to London and the Royal College of Art. The teaching there
struck him as reactionary, but he could call on London's
many resources, preferring the British Museum, the Science
Museum and other non-art institutions to the National
Gallery and the rather sluggish Tate.
In 1951 he found a studio and worked indefatigably. Art
students were not expected then to achieve instant fame or
notoriety; Hirst had time on his side. In 1962 he had his
first significant solo exhibition, at Tooth's in London.
From 1970 on he showed regularly at Angela Flowers Gallery
and then at Flowers East. He would say that he owed much to
their unfaltering support.
He taught part-time at various art schools, while Ellen
taught art in secondary schools. In 1953 they began to
travel on the Continent - to Lascaux, where Derek was
astonished by the way those majestic animal images are
powered by the convex surfaces they were painted on, and
into Spain. Spain became their spiritual home; they went
annually if they could, in spite of the Fascism that still
ruled there (Derek Hirst was one of nature's lefties), and
subsequently more comfortably as democracy was
re-established, getting to know the country well, Andalusia
especially.
Hirst was offered guest positions at various universities,
some of which took him abroad. Having been the first
artist-in-residence at Sussex in 1966, he was also a
visiting professor repeatedly at York University in Toronto,
and subsequently in Detroit, Arizona State and in Evora,
Portugal.
After the health crisis of 1976, Derek and Ellen found a
house in Sidlesham in West Sussex, close to Pagham Harbour.
They divided their time between Sidlesham and London, and
could earn some travelling money by letting the house.
Hirst's art had become, or seemed, abstract. One hesitates
to use that word because he was, above all else, an artist
of Place (he would want that capital letter). "Place" meant
Yorkshire from the first, but then also Sussex, Spain and in
1964 Morocco and, much later, the Far East including a
period in Japan where Zen gardens and a last-minute glimpse
of Mount Fuji made permanent impressions on him. Back in the
studio, memories and photos of Place would be turned into
artistic vision and physical fact.
Place meant light and form, and the spirit of the place,
often presented by architecture, noble and ignoble,
resplendent or scarred by time and events. Vision meant
celebration through simplification and enhancement,
including latterly admiration laced with awareness of
mortality. Physical fact involved a process of building and
painting that made its own contribution: you have to
"respond to what the work is saying".
The resulting images varied widely over the years, and came
in sets that showed him taking a subject through its paces.
The mouldering armchair dumped on snowy ground in Doncaster
was succeeded by meticulously painted archways on relief
panels, celebratory and glowing with colour. The sea and
seashore near Sidlesham and the weather shaping them became
other relief paintings, for which he developed his own mix
of plaster and paint. This also enabled him to make images
of Spanish houses and their deep windows and heavy doors,
with and without resonant colour but usually with artfully
damaged surfaces speaking of time and survival. There is
also the long series of golden paint-objects, subtly
imperfect, suggesting the doors of treasuries and
tabernacles, and the variations he worked on the theme of
Fuji, silent and mysterious.
The most articulate of men, Hirst spoke vividly and
humorously about his work, about the art world and about
life. He loved talking, often about artists he admired and
felt close to (Prunella Clough was a very special friend).
He worked in his Sidlesham attic studio, small but well lit
and organised to cope with dust from his hammering as well
as finely painted surfaces. It was a sad day, not long ago,
when he had to give up climbing that fold-down ladder and
confine himself to working on paper on a lower floor.
Time was when the Tate gave major retrospective exhibitions
to artists of proven calibre and published catalogues
recording their careers, but it has abandoned that national
duty. Flowers East have planned a major Derek Hirst show in
July. This will now be a memorial exhibition. In a beautiful
film made about him recently by Christine Morris, he says
that making art is a kind of journey - and that his work is
"evidence that I have been alive".
Derek Hirst, painter: born Doncaster, Yorkshire 11 April
1930; married 1951 Ellen Hempel; died Chichester, West
Sussex 17 May 2006.