Molly in the Garden, circa 1933
Ivon Hitchens began his artistic career in the 1920s, depicting a variety of subjects including interiors, figures, still-life, and landscape. In the '30s, he found his true calling and turned his attention primarily to the landscape, and the experience of being within it.
Disinterested in a representational approach, Hitchens attempted to capture the feel of the landscape with colour, form, and composition. His form of abstract figuration was a great inspiration to a younger generation of abstract painters including Patrick Heron, Roger Hilton and Peter Lanyon.
Hitchens used a variety of brush-strokes - long sweeps of colour contrasting to sharp dashes, and even planes. He creates texture and depth with a combination of thickly applied oil, which appears to maintain its liquid form, and sparsely pigmented marks in which the brush has almost run dry. Each technique is drawn together by an overarching importance of colour. Of dual significance to the artist was the principal of abstraction, and the ephemeral depiction of a landscape, figure, or still-life.
'It is not the subject that truly interests me, but the many possible ways, and finally the only possible way of expressing it. Setting up canvas and box in all weathers, I seek first to unravel the essential meaning of my subject, which is synonymous with its structure, and to understand my own psychological reactions to it. Next I must decide how best it can be rendered in paint, not by a literal copying of objects but by combinations and juxtapositions of lines, forms, planes, tones, colours etc., such as will have an aesthetic meaning when put on canvas.' - Ivon Hitchens, personal memorandum, circa 1954