Hitchens and Art

A 1931 photo of a summer bathing party in Norfolk shows Hitchens alongside some of the most promising artists of the time: Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. Whereas his companions are seen stripped partly bare in pursuit of pleasures of sun and sea, Hitchens himself appears a circumspect outsider, attired in jacket, jumper and tie, carrying a mackintosh over his arm. He resisted being stereotyped as any particular type of painter – an impressionist, or, latterly, some kind of abstract expressionist – saying “No artist should label himself. That is for others to do… A painter should have no rules or formulas.”

Setting up his canvas and paintbox in the open air, he sought “first to unravel the essential meaning of my subject, which is synonymous with its structure, and to understand my own psychological reactions to it”. He would then usually paint a quick sketch, followed by “a careful, well-knit design”, which he would then destroy, only to start all over again on the canvas, “painting freely, regardless of the literal proportions of forms”. He wrote elsewhere, “I should like things to fall into place with so clear a notation that the spectator’s eye and ‘aesthetic ear’ shall receive a clear message, a clear tune.”

It is the quite calligraphic clarity of his application of paint – a broad swathe of purplish black, say, to evoke a stretch of lake in the early morning, or a succession of broad brushstrokes (pinkish, russet and ochre) describing the cool, recessive depth of a woodland pathway in winter – that delivers in his paintings just the right note, “a clear tune”. The spectator of Hitchens’ landscapes feels absorbed in a sensuously intuitive appreciation of Nature, its enigmatic depths and silences, its thrilling fluctuations of light, tone and shadow, its swimming perspectives.

Hitchens’ best paintings conjure up with acute clarity the richly layered intricacies of a particular scene. For example, in a series of eight paintings of Warnford Water, a tree-fringed lake, he aimed to evoke, in different ways, “four entities, forming the whole subject”. These main themes were the lake itself (“swept by wind ripples and glaring light”); a “swift-flowing water race tumbling in a small fall” over a bank; “the deep, cool, clear trout pool below”; and “leading out from this pool, the winding stream, sand-banked, strung with waterweed”.