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Some of what Philip derived from his early American visits had nothing to do with

contemporary movements in American art, but came from his direct observation of

the American reality around him. For instance, he was fascinated in New York by the

policy of construction firms in leaving peepholes in the barriers which surrounded major

construction sites. One day, looking through one of them himself, he was intrigued by the

grid-like metal net which covered the entire bottom of the excavation.

Then suddenly, as he watched, there was a loud but muffled boom, and the entire grid

moved up several feet in the air before it settled down again. And he realized that the whole

thing was a protective measure to ensure that when explosives blew the excavation deeper

into the rock of Manhattan, great chunks of stone would be contained and prevented from

flying in all directions to the danger of passers by and workers on site.

The image of the rising and subsiding mesh has stayed with him since, and recurs in many

of his pictures through the years. What does it mean? Well, it doesn’t “mean” anything

specific, but it is an image of many colours, holding within it the possibility of protection as

well as imprisonment, comforting order as well as disturbing constriction. Or none of the

above – which is as a symbol should be.

Philip says that he never wanted to have anything to do with hard-edge abstraction as

found in, e.g., Kenneth Noland. But on the other hand, he never seems to have more than

an occasional seemingly random splash of paint in common with the “Action Painting” side

of Abstract Expressionism. Aftermath itself comes closer to the work of Barnet Newman or

Sol Lewitt in America, Robyn Denny in England, in its use of geometrical areas of vivid flat

colours juxtaposed. In the early 1960s Philip was also taken with the work of the American

Colour Field painters such as Mark Rothko, Morris Louis, Richard Diebenkorn and, perhaps

especially, Helen Frankenthaler, who, talking about rules and theories, observed, in Philip’s

opinion wisely, “At the end of the day, all I have to ask myself is: Have I made a beautiful

painting?”

Swyre Head 2,1974Canvas 61 x 35.6 cms 24 x 14 ins

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1974

Cityscape 1974acrylic on canvas 78.7 x 58.4 cms 31 x 23 ins

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The introduction of gradually

improving acrylic paints from the

mid-1950s also had its effect on

Philip’s manner and style of working.

What he particularly appreciated

was their speed of drying, since

he liked to paint as quickly as one

could in watercolour, and the

slowness of oils prohibited that.

Dryers accelerated the process

even further. Also he liked the

brightness and flexibility of acrylics,

and the possibility of applying them

by spray, very useful for an even

finish in colour field painting. His

painter mate Bill Jacklin acquired a

compressor to improve his spray

painting abilities, but then decided

it was not for him, so Philip bought

it from him, and found its use for a

while really exciting.

For Philip the drawbacks to acrylics included the fact that, while he liked the effect of them

on paper, he found the surface they created on canvas, as in the work of his friend John

Hoyland, slightly repulsive. After a while, consequently, he gave up acrylics and all idea of

spray painting, and switched back to oils, encouraged by the paint manufacturers’ having

invented drying media which speeded up considerably the possibilities of painting in oils at

Philip’s preferred pace.

Some of the Vietnam Requiem pieces, at five or six feet tall,

were among the largest he would ever produce.

Though far from being a natural

miniaturist, Philip always

favoured more traditional

sizes, as well as shapes, for his

canvases, so by the mid-1980s

he had moved on again to a more

practical range of sizes for an artist

who hoped to live on his art alone,

as Philip was to decide to do in 1986.

Two Yellows 1974/5Canvas 35.6 x 45.7 cms 14 x 18 ins

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Golden Sunrise 1974Canvas 58.4 x 78.7 cms 23 x 31 ins

PHILIP HICKS (Introduction to The Hoya Gallery exhibition catalogue 1975)

Hicks last exhibited in London in 1971 when his Vietnam Requiem was shown at Camden Arts Centre. This work comprised eight shaped, relief panels in a variety of media. Although they were clearly indebted to both the abstract constructivist tradition, and American ‘post-painterly’ abstraction, Hicks’ Vietnam paintings incorporated considerable figurative imagery, largely derived from his study of Vietnam news photographs. Manifestly this work was about the experience of being a soldier within an active war machine. But the works in this present show are abstract. They are ‘about’ painterly problems. Hicks has reverted to an exclusive use of the two dimensional surface, and colour has assumed a central importance which it never had before in his work. He seems intent on exploring the use of an internal and often fragmented grid, partially derived from his study of Mondrian and de Stijl. However, in his case, this is not used as a simple marker to break up the canvas into intervals. Time and time again, Hicks suggests that behind his horizontal-vertical iconography which is either floating or anchored to an edge, there is a vast, colour-saturated, illusionary space. In certain works, this disturbingly breaks through into the grid itself. In fact, as we look at some of his most successful paintings, we feel that light itself is emanating from this imaginary depth and pressing forward, towards the grid structures, from a point somewhere behind the actual physical surface. Of course, this is an illusion, but an illusion which can deepen the perception of a receptive viewer.

The apparently radical change in the kinds of quasi ‘objective’ approach was quickly superseded through an eclectic involvement in the problems of ‘tonal’ painting. But useful as it had been in des troying his monolithic ‘realism’, Hicks did not get stuck in this particular quagmire. He found the way out through monochromatic, metallic reliefs: a direction which, in many respects, represented a constructive negation of all conventional painterly concerns. Interestingly, it led to a large public commission for a 14 foot relief, situated on the wall of a housing estate near Croydon. A state ment of this kind would have been quite impossible within the restricted parameters of easel painting.

But the Vietnam Requiem represented, once again, an entirely new synthesis: Hicks retained the reliefed surface, and also created this work, too,

for a public situation, but these aspects were now combined with elements derived from both his early ‘realist’ training, and his involvement with the various abstract traditions.

After the Vietnam Requiem, it was not, at first clear how Hicks’ work would develop. In a temporarily rather confused period, he seemed to be searching for a new way forward, a fresh advance. Certainly, he produced some interesting work, including another large painted relief for a computer company. But it was not until be began an apparently unpromising series of small relief paintings, based on photographs of the faces of fashion models, that the fresh synthesis began to emerge. Hicks soon abandoned the relief, and began to deploy all his visual elements on the painted surface. The faces themselves started to fragment: they were reduced in later works in the series to an eye, or a mouth. Simultaneously, he placed ever greater importance on the structural components of the work. The abstract colour planes, and the elements which contained them (what had once been the relief) became the content of the pictures, and the figuration vanished altogether. From this point, Hicks became involved with the kinds of painterly and perceptual problems which you see before you now. His progress was complex and involved a variety of distinct solutions, making use of successively diminishing references to the empirical world.

In an article in this month’s issue of Art and Artists, l have tried to examine Hicks’ work in greater detail, and to argue that it gains in significance because, not always through the conscious intention of the artist, it engages with history: seen as a developing whole, it represents some thing more than an interesting, personal trajectory, involving the private solution of ‘aesthetic’ problems. It could be argued that, in the present historical moment, the only way that the painter can escape from the tyranny of being able to do anything he likes (with the rider that nothing he does will be of social significance) is through the search for formal innovations, new ways of putting paint on canvas, which will increase and enrich the perception of his viewers. This, I think, is what Hicks is trying to do, and, in many of these works, succeeding in doing.

PETER FULLERLondon 1975

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In 1975, when the Imperial War Museum show finally drew

a line under the Vietnam Requiem, all this was of course still

some way in the future. Meanwhile, one of his portraits from

1972 had achieved considerable publicity on its presentation

to the Royal College of Music, largely because of the fame

and newsworthiness of its subject. It was of Julian Bream, then

achieving his major success as a classical guitarist. This had

some things in common with several of the Vietnam pieces, in

that it incorporated photography and was an unconventional

shape, rectangular it is true, but presented as a diamond,

with an abstract composition, vaguely suggestive of a tracking

board game scattered with half-guitars and musical references

like “BACH” and “RCA”, enclosing a central circular medallion

with a photographic portrait of Bream and tiny images of an

aeroplane, two guitars and a lute, all rendered in delicate

pastel shades.

Another piece of public art dating from this time that got

a lot of publicity was a painted relief commissioned for the

headquarters of the Central Data Institute, one of the new

computer companies with, it was then reported in hushed tones, an annual turnover of

£100 million. The ever-faithful Peter Fuller writing in Arts Review and The Connoisseur,

regarded it as “an important breakthrough” for Philip:

At a structural level, this painted relief is the most articulate of Hicks’

major pieces to date. A precise, underlying geometric discipline has

been employed to emphasise a central, massive architectonic

shape…The end result is powerful, simple, and immediately

arresting. But…impact was not enough; he had to think

in terms of a continuous relationship with viewers.

This meant the elaboration of a detailed series

of images, stating the various aspects of the

company’s involvement with computers.

The way the mural handles this is to break down the

composition into distinct areas, with a background made up of

photographic images of computer parts and shapes, over which is

laid the main “architectonic” structure in a rich royal blue, scattered

with circles, letters and geometric symbols, over which is laid another level

including what could be read as a pair of computer screens, showing respectively

(right) Grand Fugue, 1977acrylic on canvas 203.5 x 152.5 cms 84 x 60 ins

(left) Portrait of Julian Bream, 1972acrylic relief129.5 x 129.5 cms 51 x 51 ins

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IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMThe Imperial War Museum is showing the Vietnam Requiem by Philip Hicks, first shown in London in 1971 at the Camden Arts Centre and the Robert Self Gallery. It consists of eight large painted constructions with sculpture, supported by some smaller works, and was presented to the museum in 1974. Vietnam Requiem is about the soldiers and tragedy of war and in that sense continues the tradition begun by artists like Paul Nash in 1914–18, though stylistically it is of the 1960s with its mixing of media and of abstract with figurative imagery. Philip Hicks will be showing new paintings at the Compendium Galleries, Birmingham, in May, and at the Hoya Gallery, London in October. The Requiem can be seen at the Imperial War Museum until March 30.

Arts ReviewVolume XXVII No. 5, 7 March, 1975

Philip Hicks in his studio in 1969 working on ‘Boy and Veteran’ from the ‘Vietnam Requiem’, currently on display at the Imperial War Museum.

A Touch of Spring II 1973acrylic on canvas 76.2 x 101.6 cms 30 x 40 ins

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For Miles, 4, 1974acrylic on canvas45.7 x 50.8 cms 18 x 20 ins

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a passport-type photographic mug-shot of a male and a female. (We are told that the only

condition imposed by the artist was that one of people depicted should be black.)

The only area where Fuller takes Philip to task is in his allegedly noncommittal attitude

to “the use of computers for destructive purposes. Control Data has a contract for

Polaris equipment, for example.” If this stricture seems a little bizarre today, one must

remember that in 1973 computers were a mysterious and possibly sinister development,

the multifarious uses of which, like those of atomic energy, were little understood and likely

to be politically mistrusted.

In 1975 Philip had a new one-man show in the Compendium Galleries, Birmingham, of

what were described on the invitation as “Atmospheric Abstract Paintings”, with a few

weeks later titles like Swyre Head (vertical dark bars against background of predominately

blue in one, red in another) and Riverside Drive (little boxes of dark colour against a layered

background of light colours, remotely suggesting water and sky).

What this means possibly becomes clearer, possibly not, when the show reaches London a

few weeks later, at the Hoya Gallery, where it is provided with an expository note by Peter

Fuller. He seems a little uncomfortable with Philip’s apparent retreat from obvious social

relevance, but concludes:

I have tried to examine Hicks’ work in greater detail, and to argue that it gains

in significance because, not always through the conscious intention of the artist,

it engages with history: seen as developing whole, it represents something

more than an interesting, personal trajectory, involving the private solution of

‘aesthetic’ problems. It could be argued that, in the present historical moment,

the only way that the painter can escape from the tyranny of being able to do

anything he likes (with the rider that nothing he does will be of social significance)

is through the search for formal innovations, new ways of putting paint on

canvas, which will increase and enrich the perception of his viewers. This, I think,

is what Hicks is trying to do, and, in many of these works, succeeding in doing.

Michael Ford in Arts Review took a simpler, but possibly more apposite approach when he

wrote:

I positively enjoyed looking at Philip Hicks’ paintings. Their poise; the beauty of

Hicks’ colours, and their singing effect on one another; these induced a sense

of relief and release. I would argue with one thing in Peter Fuller’s catalogue

preface. He writes of the ‘demands’ the artist makes on the spectator, and

I felt no demands being made: simply a most painterly offering, as unforced

as the fluency and balance of the paintings themselves. It seems to me very

Riverside Drive I, 1974Canvas 50.8 x 66 cms 20 x 26 ins

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pertinent that Philip Hicks is also a jazz pianist. The strong, straight lines and

bands of colour moving into and across – or broken and scattered over – the

melting, blending colours, which are often strengthened by a mesh-pattern,

move with the firm rhythm of piano chords over an instrumental backing. [One

evening during the exhibition Philip had played there with his quartet.] The total

entity’s cool, thoughtful, elegant. As a painter, Hicks has always been on the

move. His first exhibition, in 1958, was of ‘traditional’ landscapes and still-lifes.

These ‘abstracts’ are distillations of ‘reality’, into the basics of light, colour and

movement; and very beautiful.

Swyre Head 1,1975 (left)Acrylic on canvas 152.5 x 112 cms 60 x 40 ins

Evening Red,1975 (above)Acrylic on canvas 101.6 x 127 cms 40 x 50 ins