Ivon Hitchens

General Sir Cecil Blacker, K.C.B., O.B.E., M.C.
His sale, Christie's London, 12th October 1973, lot 244
Waddington Galleries, London
Austin/Desmond Fine Art, London
Robert Sandelson, London, where acquired by the present owner, 14th October 1999

Norfolk, Narborough Hall, Ivon Hitchens, Paintings, 27th May - 27th August 2007, un-numbered exhibition.

Unexamined out of frame. Original canvas. There is a pin hole visible in the bottom left corner, with slight undulation in the upper right corner. There is a slight undulation to the purple pigments in the centre of the canvas. There is a corresponding area of craquelure with a few flecks of resultant loss in this area. There is also an area of staining to this area. There is an area of minor loss, and very slight lifting in the upper left quadrant; a further area of loss to the brown pigment in the upper right quadrant and a further spot of staining to the purple pigment above the centre of the lower edge. This excepting the work appears in good overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals no obvious signs of fluorescence or retouching. Housed behind glass in a thick gilt wooden frame, set within a cream-painted wooden mount. Unexamined out of frame. Please contact the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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‘A good painter is he who, like a magician, having taken thought, utters the magic words and conjures up life from within the canvas.’ (Hitchens, letter to Alan Bowness, 1956.)

By 1964, with a Tate retrospective under his belt and a new dealer, Waddingtons, Hitchens had begun to experiment further in the principles of abstraction. His brush-strokes became freer and bolder and although he moved further away from naturalism, a trend that was to continue until his death in 1979, nature remained the principal source of his inspiration. This internal dialogue between creating a sense of place (representation) and the surface of the canvas (pure painting) is at the heart of Wooded Hollow.

Despite the title of this work indicating that the composition depicts a definite subject, the painting, at first glance, appears essentially abstract and the subject is unclear. However, the essence of the scene and mood become apparent through a complex yet subtle structure of changing colour tones and brushstrokes which balance and contrast simple suggestive shapes revealing the light and space of a nostalgic British scene. As Hitchens wrote, ‘I see my landscape as a world of spaces and objects …’. (Peter  Khoroche, Ivon Hitchens, Lund Humphries, Hampshire, 2007, p.86.)

In this work, Hitchens conjures through the spaces and allusive shapes, the spirit of a naturally occurring wooded hollow surrounded by dense foliage and thickets with a muddy floor empty of vegetation. He captures the tranquility of the scene, exploring though the changing colour tones, the play of light as it filters through the trees above the shady forest floor, resonate with hues of pinks and burgundy. Our eye is drawn around the undulating shapes suggestive of the many varied shrubs and thickets of the wood which enclose the central view of the hollow. We are also steered through gaps in the trees to glimpses of the blue sky of a summer's day in the distance and the green of fields on the other side of the copse just visible on the horizon. This tender depiction of Hitchen’s experience of nature, achieved through the abstract principles of balance and harmony, demonstrates the unique vision of the artist. His work although rooted in local landscape, has absorbed the influences of the cubists, fauves and abstract expressionists to create a personal pictorial language, placing him at the cutting edge of ‘Modernism’.