Pete Hoida artist and poet was born at Birkenhead in 1944 and died at his home in Brownshill near Stroud in 2023. He was an abstract artist committed to the modernist tradition. He ceased writing circa 1985, after which he dedicated his time wholly to painting. After a hiatus of 25 years he resumed writing and had poems published 2011–2016.
A 'Little Magazines' and 'Slim Volume' poet of the sixties/seventies, Hoida would be better represented by these later volumes: "Literary Breakfast", [1] "The Correct Demanded Direction", [2] and "Stumble", [3] which were only printed in very small editions of 300 and received scant attention. His more noticed, very early published "Lips", [4] would not represent him at his best. Also published: "Selected Poems of Blaise Cendrars" (Translation). [5] More recently, poems have been published in magazines: 'Obsessed with Pipework'; [6] 'The Rialto'. [7] In 2016 'The Decline of Heavy Industry', a pamphlet of new poems was published. [8] Hailed by the editor Philip Rush as "a return to poetry with fresh-eyed modernism".
Hoida studied painting at Hammersmith College of Art and Building (1969–1972) and Goldsmiths College School of Art, London University (1972–1974), painting thereafter from Stroud, Gloucestershire.
"Marrying an abstract distinctly English landscape sensibility that draws on Patrick Heron and Ivon Hitchens with the fierce transatlantic colourism of Hans Hofmann and Nicolas de Staël's velvety tachism, Hoida arrives at an intensely personal synthesis, resonating with landscape feeling." [9] Or as Alan Gouk puts it [10] "his colour is not just thought up in the studio as part of some "non-referential" building kit" or AG again, as above "….persist, nonetheless, in trying to render fulgent the fuliginous, to make clear things that are tacit and cloudy, that have no name until painted….." "...earthy and realistic, or realistic to the spirit of lyrical or lovely or moody feeling ..." [11] ). "Hoida's is of a more lyrical, European form of Abstract Expressionism. He is an English artist carrying on the grand traditions of English art from Constable's 'Six-Footers' to a euphoric use of colour that Hoida controls so well, so evocative but so differently spiced than Patrick Heron. His palette is his own and his art is to do with the essence of painting..". [12] " 'This is a painting,' they say: ‘attend to the object itself; observe its mechanisms.’ But who can stop the play of the imagination? Hoida is a poet: there is nothing in his painting or his poetry that would suggest he would want to. He just likes to remind us that an artefact is just that: an object made with craft and cunning, the product of a specific sensibility, a mind and a memory, in time and space.”. [13] Chris Stephens, Director of the Holburne Museum wrote of Hoida: " A formative, youthful friendship was with the great Scottish poet W.S. Graham much of whose work concerned itself with the craftsmanship of the medium, of the battle to assemble constructions of words that convey precise meaning without creating specific narratives. In his exploration of the inherent tension between the abstract qualities and evocative potential of his practice, Graham found a natural affinity with painters whose marks carried less inherent meaning than the poet’s words. One might see Hoida’s paintings in comparable ways to that constructed verse, his creation of blocks from a varied set of painting techniques like the construction of phrases, clauses or sentences and their assembly into a whole that is rich in its suggestive power but entirely non-representational." [14]
In a video for 'Abstract Critical' made in 2013 Pete Hoida discusses his work with artist Graham Boyd. A short documentary film 'The Black Severn Angel' by Alasdair Ogilvie for Damnable Iron Films in 2015 shows Hoida in the studio and on location at the River Severn, Sharpness Docks, Birkenhead Priory, and New Brighton, Merseyside. In the video 'Structure Through Colour" Mel Gooding analyses and appreciates Pete Hoida's paintings, 2016.
Selected solo exhibitions include: Axiom, Cheltenham, 1986; Guildhall Arts Centre, Gloucester, 1987 & 1992; The Living Room, London, 1994; Museum & Art Gallery, Cheltenham, 1995; 7 Goodge Place, London, 1997; deli Art, London, 2000; Ashcroft Modern Art, Cirencester, 2006; Subscription Rooms, Stroud, 2007; SE1 Gallery, London, 2008; The Museum in the Park, Stroud, & St Mary of the Angels, 2013; HSoA Gallery, London, 2015; The Malthouse, Stroud, 2018; APT (Art in Perpetuity Trust) Gallery, London, 2019; Williamson Art Gallery, Birkenhead, 2024; Museum in the Park, Stroud, 2024.
Selected group exhibitions include: Camden Arts Centre, London; Spacex, Exeter; Pelter/Sands, Bristol; The Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool; The Atkinson Art Gallery, Southport; Boundary Gallery, London; Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery; Gwl Gelf, Harlech Art Biennale; The Schoolhouse Gallery, Bath; Sun & Doves, London; Royal West of England Academy, Bristol; Dean Clough, Halifax; The Social Bases of Abstract Art, UpDown Gallery, Ramsgate
Joseph Severn was an English portrait and subject painter and a personal friend of the English poet John Keats. He exhibited portraits, Italian genre, literary and biblical subjects, and a selection of his paintings can today be found in some of the most important museums in London, including the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum and Tate Britain.
Abstract expressionism in the United States emerged as a distinct art movement in the immediate aftermath of World War II and gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s, a shift from the American social realism of the 1930s influenced by the Great Depression and Mexican muralists. The term was first applied to American art in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates. Key figures in the New York School, which was the center of this movement, included such artists as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Norman Lewis, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Theodoros Stamos and Lee Krasner among others.
Post-Impressionism was a predominantly French art movement that developed roughly between 1886 and 1905, from the last Impressionist exhibition to the birth of Fauvism. Post-Impressionism emerged as a reaction against Impressionists' concern for the naturalistic depiction of light and colour. Its broad emphasis on abstract qualities or symbolic content means Post-Impressionism encompasses Les Nabis, Neo-Impressionism, Symbolism, Cloisonnism, the Pont-Aven School, and Synthetism, along with some later Impressionists' work. The movement's principal artists were Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and Georges Seurat.
Gillian Ayres was an English painter. She is best known for abstract painting and printmaking using vibrant colours, which earned her a Turner Prize nomination.
The New York School was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active in the 1950s and 1960s in New York City. They often drew inspiration from surrealism and the contemporary avant-garde art movements, in particular action painting, abstract expressionism, jazz, improvisational theater, experimental music, and the interaction of friends in the New York City art world's vanguard circle.
Robert Motherwell was an American abstract expressionist painter, printmaker, and editor of The Dada Painters and Poets: an Anthology. He was one of the youngest of the New York School, which also included Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.
Philip Guston was a Canadian American painter, printmaker, muralist and draftsman. "Guston worked in a number of artistic modes, from Renaissance-inspired figuration to formally accomplished abstraction," and is now regarded as one of the "most important, powerful, and influential American painters of the last 100 years." He frequently depicted racism, antisemitism, fascism and American identity, as well as—especially in his later most cartoonish and mocking work—the banality of evil. In 2013, Guston's painting To Fellini set an auction record at Christie's when it sold for $25.8 million.
Patrick Heron was a British abstract and figurative artist, critic, writer, and polemicist, who lived in Zennor, Cornwall.
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham CBE was one of the foremost British abstract artists, a member of the influential Penwith Society of Arts.
Sir Richard Sheridan Patrick Michael Aloysius Franklin Bowling(né Richard Sheridan Franklin Bowling; born 26 February 1934), known as Frank Bowling, is a British artist who was born in British Guiana. He is particularly renowned for his large-scale, abstract "Map" paintings, which relate to abstract expressionism, colour field painting and lyrical abstraction. Bowling has been described as "one of Britain’s greatest living abstract painters", as "one of the most distinguished black artists to emerge from post-war British art schools" and as a "modern master". British cultural critic and theorist Stuart Hall situates Bowling’s career within a first generation, or “wave” of post-war, Black-British art, one characterised by postwar politics and British decolonisation. He is the first black artist to be elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts.
Peter Benjamin Graham was an Australian visual artist, printer, and art theorist.
Michael Goldberg was an American abstract expressionist painter and teacher known for his gestural action paintings, abstractions and still-life paintings. A retrospective show, "Abstraction Over Time: The Paintings of Michael Goldberg", was shown at MOCA Jacksonville in Florida from 9/21/13 to 1/5/14. His work was seen in September 2007 in a solo exhibition at Knoedler & Company in New York City, as well as several exhibitions at Manny Silverman Gallery in Los Angeles. Additionally, a survey of Goldberg's work is exhibited at the University Art Museum at California State University, Long Beach since September 2010.
John Hoyland RA was a London-based British artist. He was one of the country's leading abstract painters.
Carolyn Mary Kleefeld is an English-American author, poet, and visual artist. She is the author of twenty-five books, has a line of fine art cards, and has had numerous gallery and museum awards and exhibitions between 1981 and the present, in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other major cities.
Patrick Swift (1927–1983) was an Irish painter who worked in Dublin, London and the Algarve, Portugal.
Sylvia Tait is a Canadian abstract painter and printmaker.
Anthony Benjamin FRSA, RE was an English painter, sculptor and printmaker. Referred to as a 'polymathic artist' by critic Rosemary Simmons when writing about his work for the Borderline Images By Anthony Benjamin show at The Graffiti Gallery in 1979.
Peter Edwards,, is a British painter. He won the 1994 BP Portrait Award.
Marc Vaux is a British artist who rose to prominence in the 1960s. His work was included in the seminal Situation exhibition of 1960 alongside Robyn Denny, William Turnbull and Bernard Cohen among others. This exhibition was a direct reaction by British abstract artists to the recent exhibitions in London of the American Abstract Expressionists in particular the Tate's 1959 exhibition The New American Painting. Although originally headed for a career in Chemistry, Vaux eventually studied at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1957 to 1960 where he was awarded a Boise traveling scholarship which allowed him to travel in Italy, and later to work at the Jean Ponsa lithographic printing studio in Paris.
Kathleen Guthrie was a British artist who exhibited with the London Group and at the Royal Academy and also had several solo exhibitions. During a long career Guthrie painted in oils and watercolours, produced silkscreens and murals and wrote and illustrated children's books.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
