Derek Hirst; Times of London obit
Hyfler/Rosner
May 25, 2006, Thursday
Derek Hirst, artist, was born on April 11, 1930. He died on
May 17, 2006, aged 76.
British painter whose work recorded his long pursuit of the
exuberance that inspired him on his travels
WHEN the 18-year-old Derek Hirst arrived at the Royal
College of Art in 1948, he had seen only a few paintings at
the museum in Doncaster, his home town. And he had not
tested himself as a painter; only craft skills were taught
at Doncaster School of Art, where he had spent the previous
two years.
"The notion that Art might be a language or a means of
expression was unthinkable," he wrote later. But London did
not, at first, inspire him. Although Robin Darwin had just
instituted a new regime at the Royal College of Art, its
Painting School "felt like some dreadful place of
disenchantment caught up in a time-warp".
The approved style, in thrall to Sickert, did not
acknowledge that modern art had been transformed in the
early decades of the century. Few of Hirst's tutors talked
to him, and only John Minton and Kenneth Rowntree would
discuss painters as heretical as Picasso, Braque and Leger.
Left largely to his own devices, Hirst developed a naive
style indebted to the Douanier Rousseau. But he was excited
by the work of contemporary British painters in the London
galleries: Francis Bacon, Prunella Clough ("another great
influence then and to this day"), Lucien Freud, Victor
Pasmore and Graham Sutherland.
On graduating in 1951 Hirst destroyed all his student work
apart from a small self-portrait. He wanted to start again
as an artist, and experiment for a decade before having his
first solo show. "It was possible then for a young student
to be taken over in spirit by an almost lunatic optimism,"
he recalled, "politically particularly but as well in every
other way."
Determined to find his own way, he avoided the National
Gallery or the Tate and studied artefacts in the Science and
Natural History museums. He drew enlarged insects, and from
them produced small, intense paintings of a fly. He wanted
them to resemble pieces of fossil, and an austere
self-portrait in 1953 was based on a Roman sarcophagus
painting.
The same year, on a journey through France to Spain, he was
overwhelmed by the cave paintings at Lascaux -they meant far
more to him than the so-called High Art of Classical or
Renaissance times, and he wanted to emulate the way these
images, made in relief, had become part of the walls'
surface texture.
On the same journey he discovered Catalonia and for the next
two decades spent part of each year there. In Spain he
realised just how strong a sense of place could be as a
stimulus. He also found it when revisiting Yorkshire,
painting some dark, simplified seascapes inspired by Robin
Hood's Bay in the mid-1950s. Bleak and oppressive, they
suggest what a relief Spain must have been.
In 1957 he produced impressive paintings based on Catalonian
settings. Responding to the baked, elemental strangeness of
Spain at its most primordial, these confident images help to
explain why he became so wedded to the region. But he was
also frightened by the Fascist regime -Franco represented
everything that Hirst, a man of the Left, always abhorred.
While admiring artists who spent their careers exploring a
single vein, he fought against being trapped in a single
style. He identified instead with painters "like Picabia who
make shifts of emphasis and radical change of the language
they use to meet the demands of new imagery and concerns".
Before 1960 he struggled with oil paint and decided that it
did not enable him to build the surfaces he required. Then
he discovered PVA. The forerunner of acrylics, it could be
mixed with paint, used as an adhesive and above all built up
in layers as an impasto.
Some of the richly encrusted results were exhibited in his
first one-man show, at the Drian Galleries, London, in 1961.
Two more solo shows followed at Tooth's, then a leading
gallery, as well as group shows of modern British painting
in Germany, Australia and at the Pittsburgh International.
After working for a while in Andalusia, he visited Morocco
in 1964 and studied Islamic architecture. Mysterious arched
forms and dark passageways can be found in paintings like
Countdown II, executed in Cryla on relief panel.
During the 1960s he returned to his childhood haunts in
Doncaster. Struggling with what he called "a state of
disorientation", he struggled to define his troubled
response to these locations. Some of his most explosive
work, including Red Angst and the stark Second Visit, took
as their starting-point photographs of discarded armchairs
in a field near Doncaster. Battered and partially
obliterated by snow, they suggest that his home territory
had unleashed powerful, disturbed emotions.
When these armchair paintings were exhibited in 1970 at the
Angela Flowers Gallery, the critic Norbert Lynton decided
that they were "thick with overtones and undercurrents:
suffering, a life spent in battle and nothing left from it
but matter for the junk heap and for art."
But by no means everything about Hirst's life at this period
centred on negation.
Flowers became his dealer and gave him regular solo shows.
He was appointed the first artist-in-residence at Sussex
University in 1966, and in the early 1970s he was visiting
professor of painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, York
University, Toronto. There he was exhilarated by his first
sight of Native American art and produced some of his most
heraldic and imposing images: Cherokee Grande rises from the
base of the panel in a sequence of hard-edged, festively
coloured arches.
A similar celebration marks Spain-inspired paintings like
Alhambra from the same period. And in 1975 a large,
seemingly abstract image, Summer, indicated that Hirst had
achieved an unprecedented exuberance.
The following year, however, this optimism vanished. "A
serious illness brought my work, and everything else in my
life, to a traumatic halt," he wrote. Cancer of the bladder
was diagnosed, followed by debilitating surgery. As soon as
he could, Hirst forced himself into his new studio at
Sidlesham, West Sussex, where he now lived.
Eight years passed before he felt ready to exhibit new work.
"The closeness to death and trying to come to terms with
one's own mortality put me into a wilderness," he said,
"both as an artist and as a human being."
It was a terrible blow. Hirst felt that an enormous amount
of time had been lost in midcareer, just when he might have
been able to work with freedom and assurance. But a trip to
Australia, to be guest artist at the Victorian College for
Arts, Melbourne, revived him. It was his first exposure to
the art of the Aborigines, which he admired intensely. And
in 1985 he visited Hong Kong, Macao, China and Japan where
he made a pilgrimage to the sand gardens of the Zen temples
in Kyoto.
They had already exerted a deep influence on his art when he
studied photographs, but he only grasped their full
significance as metaphors when standing in the gardens
themselves. They inspired paintings filled with pyramidal
grandeur, most notably a series executed in Cryla and mixed
media entitled Garden Metaphor Kyoto.
Even so, the battle was not over. Hirst managed some
impressive landscapes inspired by Church Norton, near Pagham
harbour. They look utterly decisive, but a surprising number
of earlier versions lie beneath them -"Under each painting
are at least ten others," he admitted, "rejected or
abandoned for what seemed like better alternatives."
Their mood was sombre, too. Hirst felt attracted to subjects
where the world seemed paralysed, as if striving to recover
from an ordeal. In 1992 he produced a series of stark,
severe paintings, Winter Was Hard.
No wonder he came to feel a divide between his pre-and
post-cancer work. "The new work since 1984 seemed to me like
the product of a 'second' life," he confessed, "and the work
pre-1976 that produced by an 'alter-ego' or a
'doppelganger'."
Looking back in 1993, Hirst felt that "my life, as a human
being and as an artist, seems like a torpedo which had been
deflected off course by some accident". But he persisted,
returned to Andalusia in 1994, and made some impressive late
paintings in 2001 and the following year.
One series celebrated The Road to Santiago, and they contain
the scallop shells which pilgrims wore on their hats. "It is
a journey now I will never make," he said with sadness, "but
the paintings themselves were something of a 'pilgrimage' in
their making."
Hirst is survived by his wife, Ellen.