After his solo exhibition at Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1967, John Hoyland consciously began to seek out new colours. ‘I made myself use all kinds of strange, high-key colour relationships’, he said later. Whereas his paintings of the preceding period were dominated by red and green and the interrelation between planes of colour as flat shapes, the work he made between roughly 1969 and 1978 demonstrates a deepening experimental interest in colour combinations. A painting such as 20.9.70 holds in tension a confounding variety of wilful, unexpected contrasts: mauve beside khaki, cadmium yellow beside chocolate brown, with flesh pink and jungle green set close by. Within a few short years, Hoyland’s experiments had created a pungent new vocabulary in the colour language of abstract painting.

At the same time as he started exploring the uses of colour, Hoyland also brought the plastic qualities of paint into contention. Whereas his previous paintings were made by staining the canvas, much as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman had, in 1969 Hoyland began to formulate a more personally distinctive idiom. He accumulated large quantities of paint in concentrated rectilinear shapes, scraping them smooth and allowing them to pool in puddle-like formations of viscous, liquid matter. These rectangles relate to the painted steel sculptures of Hoyland’s close friend Anthony Caro, with whom he represented Britain at the São Paulo biennale in 1969. Around these apparently ‘heavy’ rectangles and squares, dynamic constellations of poured and splattered paint forms—contrastingly ‘light’ and weightless by contrast—began to orbit. In the case of 20.9.70 some areas of the canvas were left bare, and the exposed canvas came to represent a deep field from which built-up layers of acrylic, added sequentially one on top of the other, seem to project outwards.

When asked in 1986 about his preference for acrylic over oil paint, Hoyland evoked its novelty value—it was an exciting new product when he was a student and he recalled how it was ‘heralded as being a new “magic” material that would transform art’. As a water soluble medium, he appreciated its transparency, and he also used it to create gelatinous textures. Above all, he prized its staying power: ‘When acrylic is dry that’s it—you could hit it with a hammer!’

The pooling of paint in 20.9.70 was enabled by working with the canvas flat on the floor. Whereas Jackson Pollock had made his dripped and poured paintings on unstretched canvas, Hoyland’s stretched canvases allowed him to pour large quantities of paint and then position them by tipping the rigid plane this way and that. Acrylic paints do not mix together easily and the interaction of unmixed paints in 20.9.70 created an effect akin to marbling, which further deepens the variety and material complexity of the finished paint surface.

Between 1960 and 1976, Hoyland consistently titled his paintings with the date on which he completed them. Because of this practice, it is possible to give a detailed account of formal developments that took place in his work over short periods of time. From 1965 until 1969, he made paintings with large fields of thinly applied colour, often arranged in rectilinear panels divided by fine lines. Then in 1969 he began to use thicker paint and to manipulate paint on the surface of the canvas. Whereas Hoyland had previously used acrylic paint, a water-soluble medium, to create effects of transparency and dye-like intensity of saturation, he suddenly began using it in great quantities to create tangible, opaque layers with a mixture of outlines – some rectilinear and precise, others splashed and wave-like. In paintings from 1969 and 1970, including 20.9.70, he forged a personally distinctive idiom in the combination of loose, improvisatory and controlled, precise applications of paint.