Colour! Print by John Hoyland and Glass by Paul Stopler

About

As the critic William Feaver wrote, 'A pukka Hoyland is a work not of hand and eye, but of total Self.' And it was this whole-hearted commitment to painting that characterised his six decades of work. His career was decisively influenced in the late 1950s and 1960s by his experience of American Abstract Expressionism. But as an artist and a man he was enough of an individual to be able to knowingly absorb and deflect those influences, and set himself on his own path. 

Hoyland preferred not to be known as an abstract painter. He felt it too calculating a term or that it implied some kind of premeditation in his process. After an initial dalliance with figurative painting in the 1950s he became a life-long proponent of the possibilities of non-figurative imagery, which possessed for him, he once wrote, 'the potential for the most advanced depth of feeling and meaning'. As Andrew Lambirth writes: 'His paintings are abstracts but they are not about absolutes. They are... very particular emotions, thoughts and feelings dependent upon the act of looking.Stopler is a Bristol based glass artist practicing lost-wax kiln-casting. He graduated with an MA in Ceramics and Glass from the Royal College of Art in 2011, before joining Bristol's Maze Studios in 2012.

Paul's practice is concerned with the craft of lathe-turning waxes to produce unique cast glass vessels. This has led to the development of new cast pieces that reproduce the complexity of the turned wax vessels. Using finishing techniques where the glass is rotated as abrasive grinding and polishing medium are applied, has enabled vessels to be completed in the same turned motion in which the forms were made in the wax.

The pieces are ground and polished to a satin finish, facilitating a soft interior view of light, tone and colour within the glass. Selected facets are polished for contrast. A single translucent colour is chosen for its potential to transmit changing hues and light accents; the deeper the mass of glass, the more saturated the colour.