Derek HollandA painter rediscovered

CRICKET FINE ART2 Park Walk, Chelsea, London SW10 0AD

24 April – 11 May 2013

Montezuma. Acrylic on canvas, 152 x 101 cm. 1966.

Derek Holland’s career could so easily have taken a very different course. Having served in the Grenadier Guards, he left his hometown of Chesterfield to study at The Central School of Arts and Crafts in post-war London, where his tutors included Hans Tisdall, Morris Kestelman and Blair Hughes-Stanton. He was soon a prize-winner in the prestigious Young Contemporaries, and joined the likes of Roger Hilton and Keith Vaughan on The Central School’s staff. In 1959 Holland’s hard-edge abstraction was included in Artists of Fame and Promise at the Leicester Galleries, as well as The Whitechapel Gallery’s touring Guggenheim Award. During the 60s and 70s he regularly exhibited at the Redfern Gallery alongside the avant-garde of post-war British and European painting. With his artist wife Marjorie, he had taken up a teaching post in the West Country, where he rejoined Roger and Rose Hilton, as well as making new friendships with fellow abstract painters and members of the Newlyn Artists’ Society, Terry Frost and Alex Mackenzie. In 1966 his work featured in an exhibition of British Art in Monte Carlo, organised by Peggy Guggenheim.

If he had continued on this path, Holland’s ‘Color Field’ paintings would have surely guaranteed him an established place among his peers of post-war British abstraction. Holland, however, was essentially an artist of a different sensibility and more restless nature, and he began to feel that his non-figurative work had reached an impasse. In 1974, he gave up his job, travelled to France and started to make drawings of the small towns and villages. Back in his Plymouth studio, he used these to create gouaches, initially based on the architecture of the shop fronts and facades of buildings; the structure maintained a link to the earlier abstraction but the marks were now increasingly

gestural. These formed the core of a major solo exhibition in 1980 at Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, as by now he had also turned his back on the London art world.

Countless sketchbooks were filled with drawings made on return visits year after year, building up an inexhaustible supply of material to develop his subject matter into the coastal and rural landscape of France. His choice of place became significant, the paintings conveying an intense atmosphere of a France which had remained unchanged for centuries: the church spires and blue roofs of small Breton towns, the remote beaches of the wild Atlantic coast and the sun-drenched hill villages of Provence and the Languedoc. Through his mastery of subtle, warm tones, Holland’s paintings, like his hero’s Matisse, achieve a colour-created space, containing a light that radiates from within the painting itself. Over the course of a quarter of a century, his final mature style has developed; the increasingly restless brushmarks blending into a sublime radiant harmony.

“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric,” observed W. B. Yeats, “but of the quarrel with ourselves, we make poetry.” There are few contemporary painters to whom these words better apply. This first London exhibition of his work in nearly fifty years can only increase the long-overdue recognition that Derek Holland is one of the most original British artists of his generation.

Francis MallettFebruary 2013

Derek Holland – The Painter as Poet

I was eleven years old when I first encountered Derek Holland in September 1960. I was a new boy at Plymouth College and Derek was in charge of the Art Department, so all of the pupils at the school passed through his classes. I left the school in July 1968, a little short of my nineteenth birthday and about to embark on a Foundation Course at Somerset College of Art in Taunton. Through those eight years of secondary schooling, Derek transformed my understanding of myself and enriched immeasurably the possibilities that lay open to me. He did this through the warmth and openness of his personality, his sensitivity to adolescence, his evident pleasure and passion in his subject, and through the selfless dedication that led to his running of an after-hours art club every full day of the week, including Sunday afternoons for those who, like myself, were boarding at the school. Despite his great achievements as a painter, he couldn’t teach me how to paint – I am inept and treat painting somewhat like colouring-in – but he did teach me how to look and how to draw and he did make it possible for me to make sculpture. He showed me that there were good reasons why I liked playing around with stuff and that it did indeed have a place in the world. In short, he believed in me.

When I first arrived at the school the art club was located in a basement beneath the library annex. One day I went along and found it was a rather dusty and dirty place, but not inappropriately or neglectfully so. There I found plaster, presumably also clay, and probably wire netting and jute scrim to use with the plaster. There was also a pile of logs that could be used for wood carving. This pile attracted my attentions and, as I searched through it, one of the logs struck me as being rather like a pig’s

head. I happily set about modifying it to increase the resemblance; it was the first sculpture that I recall making. In my second year at the school a new building opened with a new canteen, clean kitchens, new classrooms and a purpose built art room – a large, bright corner room on the first floor with fine views. The former school basement canteen became a new home for the after-hours art club, fitted with work benches, potters’ wheels, kiln, plaster room and even a lithograph press. This cave became my home for as many hours as I could get there during the rest of my time at the school, even to the extent that I finally had a key that would let me in at weekends. It is a place that I am still exploring.

On Sunday afternoons it wasn’t always Derek in charge, sometimes the cartoonist David McKee took the sessions. But Derek would always turn up in his green Hillman estate, smartly dressed with Marjorie, his wife, at his side (and she was equally interested in what was going on) and their superbly elegant Schnauzer terrier – with a moustache not unlike Derek’s – strutting on his lead.

As if all this extra-curricular activity were not enough, during school drama productions – a Christmas revue and a full-length drama at the end of the Easter term – Derek also took responsibility for the sets, recruiting art-club regulars to help. I remember a very effective set for Terence Rattigan’s Ross and another which involved the construction of a section of a tube train interior, for which I had the pleasure of inventing the adverts for the strip over the windows above the seats. He also oversaw the make-up on production nights, so I got to paint the faces of my friends, making them handsome, old, swarthy or female as the occasion demanded.

Derek Holland: a personal memory by Richard Deacon

And then, on top of all this, together with other enthusiasts, he was instrumental in setting up Plymouth Arts Centre, one of the country’s first. After it had opened, I was asked on occasions to assist Derek hanging exhibitions, and remember helping lift a Jackson Pollock up the spiral stairs, as well as, at other times, hanging a Jo Tilson construction and a whole set of Matisse’s Jazz lithographs.

I spent my final year at the school on a sort of pre-Foundation course, doing some work in the physics labs, trying to project stress patterns in transparent plastics through polarized filters, or drawing in the art room and around the school or often down in the basement, making sculpture and grappling with the lithograph press. A couple of times a week I also took the five minute walk away from the school to Derek’s house, where Marjorie was giving me a rapid and intensive course in Art History in preparation for my A-level.

Where Derek found the energy I don’t know, and of course it couldn’t last: a few years after I left, he quit the school to concentrate more on his own painting. He is a wonderful painter, and whilst I was at the school he exhibited with the Redfern Gallery in Cork Street. It gave me a huge thrill to see his name on the gallery list of artists when I walked down Cork Street – and in the mid- to late sixties, I took every possible opportunity to hang out in London. Alex Mackenzie and John Plumb, in particular, were his mates. He’d met Plumb at The Central School – and I suppose this sense of his being connected to worlds outside of the school was important; a school can, after all, seem an enclosed, hot-house world.

I hope Derek understands how much he means to me, although, inevitably, as the years went by the contact diminished. Many years later, in September 2000, in a rather difficult period in my own life, I was on a solitary holiday, staying in Torpoint just across the Tamar from Plymouth. Walking down Looe Street one day, I glanced in at the window of the Arts Centre. To my astonishment, I immediately knew that the three drawings hanging there were Derek’s; their construction was absolutely familiar to me. I went in to see the exhibition and spent a long time absorbing the fabulous paintings. Derek’s way of constructing through drawing, deconstructing through painting, and then reconstructing with colour is completely absorbing. But what moved me most I think is more selfish – I hadn’t seen Derek’s name but recognized him from his drawing and was overwhelmed by the gift he has given me.

Richard DeaconFebruary 2013

Richard Deacon CBE is one of Britain’s foremost living sculp-tors, winner of the Turner Prize in 1987.

Conquistador.Acrylic on canvas, 152 x 101 cm. c.1966.

Event.Acrylic on canvas, 152 x 101 cm. 1968.

Breton Shop Front, Brest, Finistère, Brittany.Gouache on paper, 37 x 56 cm. c.1986.

Breton Teinturerie, Brest, Finistère, Brittany.Gouache on paper, 37 x 56 cm. c.1986.

Various sketchbook drawings, 1987 – 2000.

Villeneuve-Minervois, Aude, Languedoc-Roussillon.Oil on canvas, 102 x 153 cm. 1991.

River Orb at Bédarieux, Languedoc-Roussillon, Hérault.Oil on canvas, 101 x 127 cm. 1993.

Port-Saint-Père, Loire-Atlantique.Oil on canvas, 97 x 127 cm. 1995.

Caunes-Minervois, Aude, Languedoc-Roussillon.Oil on canvas, 76 x 104 cm. 1998.

Porspoder, Finistère, Brittany.Oil on canvas, 71 x 94 cm. 1998.

Le Faou, Finistère, Brittany.Oil on canvas, 76 x 101 cm. 1999.

Pontrieux, Côtes d’Armor, Brittany. Oil on canvas, 101 x 127 cm. 1999.

Daoulas, Finistère, Brittany. Oil on canvas, 101 x 127 cm. 1999.

Pornic, Loire-Atlantique, waterfront and Citroën garage.Oil on canvas, 103 x 154 cm. 2000.

Pont Croix, Finistère, Brittany.Oil on canvas, 101 x 127 cm. 2000.

Quimperlé, Finistère, Brittany. Oil on canvas, 101 x 127 cm. 2000.

Brignogan-Plage, Finistère, Brittany.Oil on canvas, 101 x 152 cm. 2000.

Servian, Hérault, Languedoc-Roussillon.Oil on canvas, 102 x 152 cm. 2002.

Blaye, Gironde, Aquitane.Oil on canvas, 122 x 153 cm. 2005.

Pont Croix, Finistère, Brittany.Oil on canvas, 101 x 127 cm. 2006.

Montendre, Charente-Maritime.Gouache on paper, 37 x 56 cm. 1989.

Thézan-les-Béziers, Hérault, Languedoc- Roussillon.Gouache on paper, 37 x 56 cm. 1993.

La Liquière, Hérault, Languedoc-Roussillon.Gouache on paper, 37 x 56 cm. 1993.

Saint-Gilles-Croix-de-Vie, Vendée,Pays de la Loire.Gouache on paper, 37 x 56 cm. 1994.

Uzès, Gard, Languedoc-Roussillon.Gouache on paper, 37 x 56 cm. 1995.

1927 Born Chesterfield. Educated Chesterfield School1945–48 Grenadier Guards1952–54 Full-time studies, Chesterfield College of Art1954–57 London Central School of Arts & Crafts – Painting and Mural Painting1957–59 Central School – Instructor in Life Drawing & Basic Design1958–59 Hornsey College of Art – Art Teaching Certificate1959–73 Plymouth College – Head of Art Department1974 Spent two months in rural France. Regular visits thereafter1956 London Group1957 Young Contemporaries1958 Elected to Society of Mural Painters1958–59 Artists of Fame and Promise, Leicester Galleries1959 Guggenheim Award Exhibition – British Section, Whitechapel Gallery and Provinces1961 Society of Mural Painters Exhibition, Victoria & Albert Museum1966–74 Redfern Gallery Group Exhibitions1966 British Art, Monte Carlo1967–68 Leicestershire Education Authority Collection, Whitechapel Gallery1968 Sheviock Gallery, Cornwall – Solo Exhibition1980 Plymouth City Art Gallery – Solo Exhibition, ‘Paintings of France’1984 Elected to Newlyn Society and regular exhibitor thereafter1991 New Street Gallery, Plymouth – Solo Exhibition1993 White Lane Gallery, Plymouth – Solo Exhibition1995 White Lane Gallery, Plymouth – Retrospective Exhibition1999 Plymouth City Art Gallery – ‘Couples’ – invited artists2000 Plymouth Arts Centre – Solo Exhibition, ‘New Paintings & Drawings’2005 New Street Gallery, Plymouth – Solo Exhibition, ‘New Paintings’

Derek Holland – cv

Derek Holland, 1995.

Published by White Lane Press © White Lane Press, 2013

Images © Derek Holland, 2013

ISBN 978-0-9568488-4-0

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