These large-scale works painted in the past two decades have not been shown in public before.
They explore new ways of seeing and depicting aspects of landscape and represent a departure from the artist’s earlier paintings of landscapes with wide horizons and large skies, covering the period up to the late 1980s.

A time of working with aerial photography, flying low over the fields of the South Downs, had given Hitchens a different awareness of the landscape. The subject matter of these recent paintings is still landscape-related but freer in its interpretation, with objects inhabiting their own environment and space. The viewer’s relationship with these large canvases changes with proximity, as smaller areas of detail capture the landscape on a more intimate scale. Dots and lines reflect rows of stubble, fence lines in the ground, steams and paths on the hills. Dark areas hark back to the custom of stubble burning, which remained common into the 1990s.

The decade after 1990 saw fundamental changes in Hitchens’ work and in his approach to the subject of landscape.
He dispensed with many features of his earlier work and turned his attention to exploring landscape through its essential elements, such as stones, sand or wood. Structures were reduced to the basic forms of line and circle. The device of outlining an area repeatedly with parallel lines draws both on contour lines and tree growth rings and the more transient patterns created by the plough.

An innovation of this time saw Hitchens depart from the use of conventional square-cornered canvases. These paintings reveal the influence of other, three-dimensional art forms, such as land art and sculpture. The selection of works in this gallery includes examples of distinctive, irregularly shaped and layered canvases.

The main focus of this section is the Far Wood series of paintings, which form a large part of John Hitchens’ work from this period.

Far Wood, with its dense vegetation, lies near the artist’s Sussex studio. Locations further afield gave rise to a contrasting group of paintings in the course of the 1970s. Painted at Selsey and Scotland, they show Hitchens interpreting other landscapes in the British Isles, such as the wide, sandy beaches of North Uist.

The Far Wood landscapes of the 1980s are characteristic of Hitchens’ approach at this time. He was beginning to dispense with skylines and cloud formations, and his paintings were becoming freer in their construction and brushwork. A number of smaller paintings featuring the Wealden view from Duncton Hill, and scenes in Wales date to the same period. Towards the end of this period, the Great Storm of 1987 hastened these developments by introducing new and unfamiliar forms to Hitchens’ subject matter.

One of the earliest works in the exhibition is South Downs Blue Hill. Painted in 1964, it shows a view of the South Downs landscape close to his Sussex studio – an environment which has been a defining influence throughout his artistic life.

This final section shows several examples of Hitchens’ early landscapes, featuring open spaces, hills, the sea, and cloud formations.

Flowers were another theme of this period. The resulting group of paintings includes examples of abstraction, reducing flowers to spaces of colour. The subject was pursued into the 1980s, with later works becoming more naturalistic.