Artists & Illustrators – September 2019

2. Colour

and space

COMPOSITION

Continuing his look at the compositional lessons we can learn from the masters,

JAKE SPICER turns his attentions to the colourful British painter Ivon Hitchens

T

he career of 20th-century

British painter Ivon Hitchens

spanned six decades, from

his emergence in the 1920s to his

death on 29 August 1979; his oeuvre

described a journey from experimental

early paintings that remain tethered to

the observed world to later abstract

works that explore interactions of

colour through clear, bold brush marks.

Pallant House Gallery is currently

holding the largest exhibition of

Hitchens’ work for 30 years, Space

through Colour. This is an appropriate

setting, given the Chichester venue’s

proximity to the South Downs where

Hitchens painted throughout his life.

In this article we’ll be looking at Ivon

Hitchens’ use of colour in several key

paintings from the exhibition that

should first be appreciated as

complete works in themselves before

being analysed. His canvases are

poems in paint and, however much

ABOVE Ivon

Hitchens, Red

Centre, 1972, oil on

canvas, 60x73cm