Love and Grief (5.4.006) 2006

Curator: Right, so here we have John Hoyland's mixed-media piece, “Love and Grief (5.4.006),” created back in 2006. What are your initial thoughts? Editor: My immediate feeling is…melancholy, despite those vibrant bursts of colour on the left. The rest of the canvas is steeped in indigo, evoking almost a sense of underwater loss, doesn't it? Curator: I get that, I do. There's something about that central darker area—it feels like a deep, emotional well. And then the frenetic energy of the splashes, contrasting so violently... It really tugs at something raw. Thinking about Hoyland's practice, he embraced this sort of all-over painting technique... Editor: Yes, and I see the layers upon layers here; it is anything but spontaneous. What catches my attention is the sheer quantity of material. I wonder about the studio, the wastage... all the physical effort needed for such scale. Hoyland was not only thinking of colour relationships, but making a concrete claim on his space. The 'stuff' of art matters. Curator: Absolutely, and that 'stuff' is almost fighting each other here. Those energetic pops seem almost desperate against that grounding darkness. It makes you consider, doesn't it, the relationship between holding on and letting go—a visual push and pull within Hoyland's experience and his process of creation. There is something brave and unsettling in leaving that tension unresolved on the canvas. Editor: Precisely. Look at those dark trickles coming down, contrasting the bright chaos on the side—there's a clear materiality to those drips. In my perspective, these paintings celebrate the art's presence as matter above symbolic value. Curator: Well, in this viewing, you certainly draw my attention to the physicality, that constant cycle of application and negation…a fitting echo perhaps, of those larger themes the title hints towards, like attachment and absence? Editor: Perhaps—though maybe such notions obscure his raw materiality, if you ask me. Curator: A raw space, definitely. Editor: That, I would say.