IVON HITCHENS (1893-1979)

'Freshness of colour, harmony of tone and vitality of brush-stroke are what immediately delight the eye: the artist's control of our vision - the way he directs it inevitably over every part of the canvas - can be so subtle and so sure that we may remain unaware of it. Yet it was always in terms of structure that Hitchens discussed his painting, never in terms of colour, partly because in his practice colour creates structure (the two-dimensional pattern on the surface and, simultaneously, spatial recession), partly because colour was not something preconceived but instinctively built up in the act of painting, and so finally inseparable from the structure' (P. Khoroche, Ivon Hitchens, London, 1990, p. 87).