Question

Pete Hoida artist and poet, was born at Birkenhead in 1944. He is an abstract artist committed to the modernist tradition. He ceased writing circa 1985, after which he dedicated his time wholly to painting. After a hiatus of 25 years he resumed writing and has had poems published 2011-2016.

A 'Little Magazines' and 'Slim Volume' poet of the sixties/seventies, Hoida would be better represented by these later volumes: "Literary Breakfast", "The Correct Demanded Direction", and "Stumble", which were only printed in very small editions of 300 and received scant attention. His more noticed, very early published "Lips", would not represent him at his best. Also published: "Selected Poems of Blaise Cendrars" (Translation). More recently, poems have been published in magazines: 'Obsessed with Pipework'; 'The Rialto'. In 2016 'The Decline of Heavy Industry', a pamphlet of new poems was published. Hailed by the editor Philip Rush as “a return to poetry with fresh-eyed modernism".

Hoida studied painting at Hammersmith College of Art and Building (1969–1972) and Goldsmiths College School of Art, London University (1972–1974), painting thereafter from Stroud, Gloucestershire.

"Marrying an abstract distinctly English landscape sensibility that draws on Patrick Heron and Ivon Hitchens with the fierce transatlantic colourism of Hans Hofmann and Nicolas de Staël's velvety tachism, Hoida arrives at an intensely personal synthesis, resonating with landscape feeling." Or as Alan Gouk puts it "his colour is not just thought up in the studio as part of some "non-referential" building kit" or AG again, as above "….persist, nonetheless, in trying to render fulgent the fuliginous, to make clear things that are tacit and cloudy, that have no name until painted….." “...earthy and realistic, or realistic to the spirit of lyrical or lovely or moody feeling ...” ). “Hoida's is of a more lyrical, European form of Abstract Expressionism. He is an English artist carrying on the grand traditions of English art from Constable's 'Six-Footers' to a euphoric use of colour that Hoida controls so well, so evocative but so differently spiced than Patrick Heron. His palette is his own and his art is to do with the essence of painting..”. “ ‘This is a painting,’ they say: ‘attend to the object itself; observe its mechanisms.’ But who can stop the play of the imagination? Hoida is a poet: there is nothing in his painting or his poetry that would suggest he would want to. He just likes to remind us that an artefact is just that: an object made with craft and cunning, the product of a specific sensibility, a mind and a memory, in time and space.”.

 

...Wikipedia