‘I spend a lot of time looking for structures and looking for things to hang a painting on. You’ve got to have a structure otherwise you’ll just paint chaos.’
In his last decades Hoyland kept a series of sketchbooks and scrapbooks in which he gathered material collected from all sorts of different contexts.
The sketchbooks contain brightly-coloured diagrams drawn with Stabilo marker pens, each sketch forming an idea to be stored away for future use. Not all of course were realised. There are also gnomic quotations from Barnett Newman, Nabokov or Delacroix (from whatever he had been reading), extended thoughts about his work and possible titles for paintings. One comment scrawled under a typically jokey banner, ‘That’s all folks / The End’, reads: ‘They are not about worldly power. They are not about being impressive, they are not about image, history, narrative, calculation, skill? They are about feeling and fear, about everything.’ [28.4.07]