Artist and emeritus tutor Francis Hoyland has an artistic practice spanning over seventy years. A painter and printmaker whose work is held in collections including the British Museum, Yale University and the Methodist Art Collection. In this film, he recalls his years teaching at the Royal Drawing School, reflecting fondly on the life room – its particular atmosphere of quiet focus and the shared concentration between tutor, student and model.
Drawing has been central both to his teaching and to his own artistic practice. Hoyland speaks of drawing as a lifelong act of looking more deeply: a discipline shaped by geometry and proportion, but also a form of meditation in which attention becomes more intense, the world clearer, and drawing itself a method that “enlarges our self-knowledge.”
Biography
Francis Hoyland (b. Selly Oak, Birmingham, UK 1930) studied painting at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts and the Slade School of Fine Art. He won the Abbey Minor scholarship to visit Italy in 1951 and later taught at the West of England College of Art, Bristol, Chelsea School of Art, Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts (1966-92) and for the Royal Drawing School. He wrote 'Painting' in 1966, 'Alive to Paint' and 'Painter's Diary' in 1997.
He had solo shows at Galerie de Seine (1956), Beaux Arts Gallery (1960 & 1961); a retrospective at the South London Gallery (1969); 'Diptychs of the Life of Christ' were exhibited at Chichester and Southwark Cathedrals (1972); 'The Forgotten Fifties', which toured from Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield (1984), and participated in 'Camberwell Artists of the 40s and 50s', Belgrave Gallery (1988). Other exhibitions included at Sweet Waters Gallery, London (1990), Chappel Galleries, Colchester (2002, 2025), and North Light Gallery, Huddersfield (2004). In 2003, 91 of Hoyland's etchings of the 'Life of Christ' were shown at the British Museum.
Drawing can be a way of seeing deeper and deeper, a way of seeing things you would not normally. You're seeing relationships you just would not normally be aware of. To that extent, you're enlarging your perception.”
Francis Hoyland