Derek Hirst; Guardian obituary
Hyfler/Rosner
Prolific artist who built a highly personal world from
diverse styles and materials
Brian Morley
Thursday May 25, 2006
Guardian
Derek Hirst, who has died after a long illness aged 76, was
pre-eminently a painter's painter. Of all the artists
working in England over the past 50 years, only Prunella
Clough (obituary, December 28 1999) or possibly Patrick
Caulfield (obituary, October 3 2005) has enjoyed such
widespread and unconditional admiration from their peers.
His work has close affinities with that of Clough, a friend
and painter he admired. They shared particular qualities of
integrity, and each created an entirely personal world,
which they were able to sustain and extend with an
imaginative unpredictability.
Hirst was arguably one of the finest and most important
painters of his generation, yet he is still sadly underrated
and poorly represented in our national collections. There
are several reasons for this. First, the work itself. Over
the years there were times when the appearance of his
paintings seemed to have changed quite radically. His
subjects included armchairs, doors, archways, Japanese
motifs, and the sea, land and sky, and he employed equally
wide-ranging media - not only oils and acrylic, but dyes,
sand, PVA glue, plaster, rope and dried reeds. All this was
in a variety of styles, from hard-edged bands of carefully
calculated pure colour to softer, earth-covered stained
surfaces reminiscent of rust or mud. Much of his work is in
relief, yet many of his strongest images are flat and on
paper. He experimented constantly, and the sheer variety of
his work meant that Hirst never had the kind of marketable
image beloved of many galleries and arts journalists.
Second, his career was interrupted by a number of problems.
In 1976, he was diagnosed with cancer and told that he might
live a week, perhaps a month. Having to deal with
debilitating surgery, closeness to death and a sense of his
own mortality meant that he lost eight years in his
progress. Painting relies to a large extent on the artist's
physical strength and mental well-being, and there were many
times between 1976 and 1984 when Hirst could not be certain
to finish any painting that he started. The work produced
after 1984 seemed like a second life, and he compared his
situation to that of a torpedo temporarily deflected off
course but then able to return to its original target.
Hirst was born in Doncaster, where, at 16, he went to art
school with the firm intention of becoming an artist.
Despite teaching mostly focused on "craft skills", he gained
admission to the Royal College of Art painting school in
1948, aged 18, with little experience of the theory or
practice of painting. The RCA was a big disappointment, with
little evidence in the teaching that the 20th century had
even begun. The only tutor whom he found sympathetic was
John Minton, who introduced him to the work of Picasso,
Braque and Léger, and made him aware of the modern movement.
When Hirst graduated in 1951, it was with some relief. He
destroyed all the work he had produced at the RCA, with the
exception of one small self-portrait, and decided to start
again.
It was 10 years before he felt able to show his work
publicly, during which time he established a studio in
London and worked as a visiting lecturer at various art
schools. He spent more time studying artefacts in the
British Museum, the V&A and the Natural History and Science
museums than looking at paintings in the Tate or the
National Gallery. He also travelled.
In 1953 Hirst visited France and, for the first time,
Catalonia. This journey had a profound and lasting effect on
his work. He saw the cave paintings at Lascaux and was
overwhelmed by the sophistication and physical presence of
images drawn into the relief and surface textures of the
walls, where "image and substance are uniquely joined". In
the south of France he also realised how art was often
produced out of a strong sense of place. "Seeing Mont St
Victoire was to understand Cézanne without the help of any
art historian," he said. Catalonia, where he was to spend
part of every year until 1973, not only extended his
understanding of Miró, Gaudí and Tapies, but dominated his
life and influenced his work for the next 20 years.
In 1964 he visited Morocco to study north African
architecture. He also continued to teach and hold residences
and visiting professorships both here and in the United
States, Canada and Australia.
In 1977 Hirst moved his studio from London to Sidlesham,
West Sussex, a radical shift from city to country. There he
became preoccupied with the changing seasons and the
movement of the sea, and by the early 1980s his work had
become obsessively focused on the beach at Church Norton,
and the mud flats, transformed twice daily by the tide. It
is possible that his strong identification with "place" was
related to thoughts of imminent death, but he produced a
large number of reliefs made from a mixture of sand, PVA and
rope and other locally found materials, culminating in the
early 1990s with an impressive series of seascapes, entitled
Winter Is Hard. These paintings, on the edge between
abstraction and figuration, combine relief, texture and
earthy, rusty colours over-painted with white. They show a
control and mastery of materials and processes arrived at
through long and systematic experimentation.
Hirst's work was widely exhibited internationally; in
London, after showing successfully at Tooth's during the
1960s, he moved to Angela Flowers. His first show at
Flowers' Lisle Street gallery, in 1970, was an instant
success. It consisted of seven "armchair" paintings and was
acclaimed by important critics, among them Peter Fuller and
Norbert Lynton. Flowers, noted for the support and loyalty
given to their artists, showed Hirst's work regularly
throughout his many difficulties and vicissitudes, and he
was able, in 1987, to give up his post as principal lecturer
in painting at Kingston Polytechnic and resume painting full
time. His final show, at Flowers Central in January last
year, combined colour, surface, texture and relief, and was
a fitting summation of a life's work.
As time passes, the shifts and changes in the appearance of
Hirst's work, which once appeared drastic, even capricious,
will not hide the fact that the passions and preoccupations
that underlie the work have remained constant across the
decades. He was an important painter, skilful, intellectual,
obsessive, emotional and sometimes difficult. His attitude
to art, he said, was most eloquently expressed by one of his
many heroes, the American poet William Carlos Williams in a
fragment from his book Paterson: "To make a start/ out of
particulars/ and make them general, rolling/ up the sum, by
defective means -/ Shifting the trees/ just another dog/
amongst a lot of dogs. What/ else is there? And to do?"
He is survived by his wife, Ellen.
Barry Hirst writes: In 1971, when I was appointed head of
fine art at the then Sunderland Polytechnic, Derek was one
of the first people I sought to invite as a visiting
lecturer. He demanded to be flown up, as "the train journey
would waste too much time". Being fond of shellfish, he also
asked if we might organise a trip to the North Shields fish
quay in order to buy some crabs to take back down to London.
He had recently returned from teaching at York University,
Toronto, the evidence for this being an ankle-length fur
coat, which was probably de rigueur for a winter in Canada.
He certainly impressed them on the fish quay. He bought half
a dozen crabs, but he had not counted on the fact that they
were still alive, and although their claws were tied
together, they were still quite frisky. By the time he
reached London, they had escaped from their bag in the
overhead locker. On subsequent visits, he concentrated on
the sea trout.
He visited frequently. He was articulate, and offered the
students a rich and varied experience. His career as an
artist has not received the public attention it deserves:
his achievement is substantial. We first met when I got my
first, decent, part-time teaching job in the late 1950s.
Periodically I would receive mail meant for him, and I
suppose he occasionally received things meant for me. I
think I had the best of it, as his letters were far more
interesting.
For many years he fought cancer, but like everything else it
was made to come second to his work. I feel very privileged
to have enjoyed his friendship. He was a dear man - and a
hell of a good painter.
· Derek Hirst, artist, born April 11 1930; died May 17 2006