‘Standing in front of his paintings we might feel just such variegations of mood and feeling. They are so alive, so unpredictable, so disconcerting, and, yes, so beautiful if we make them so.’ Mel Gooding
‘I am just curious about what is going to happen … what I can do with colour… I don’t want to do what I have done before … the main thing is to do what surprises me.’ Graham Boyd
Goldmark has presented and sold the work of many classic abstract artists (from Kandinsky to Miró, Caro to Hoyland) and of artists whose work deliberately incorporates alongside some kind of figuration the visual findings of abstraction (from Picasso to Matisse to Piper and Richards). It is of course the case that there are many ways in which geometric design, or artificial colour (heightened, say, or darkened, or exaggerated), or expressive brushwork and impasto, or chiaroscuro etc. − all by definition ‘abstract’ devices − are aspects of all kinds of figurative art throughout history. All art is in some sense an abstraction from observed actuality. This exhibition nonetheless, constitutes a significant moment for the gallery: for Graham Boyd was an artist who was utterly committed to pure abstraction, the first such artist to be ‘represented’ by Goldmark.
Graham Boyd spent two years in what was then Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in the early 1950s and the dramatic scale of the African landscape had a profound impact on his perception of space and its representation. In the 1960s and 70s he discovered acrylic and subsequently worked exclusively in that medium. These experiences and discoveries powered his decisive move away from his studies in illustration and early incarnations as a figurative and landscape painter, towards the use of form and colour as expressive means in their own right.
In 1976 he was appointed as Head of Painting at the Hertfordshire College of Art and Design, St. Albans. As a principal Lecturer, he led the team responsible for developing a unique part-time B. A. Hons. Fine Art Degree Course specially designed to meet the needs of mature students.
For the past four decades Graham Boyd worked from his Chipperfield studio in Hertfordshire. Despite his status and global acclaim, Boyd constantly sought to move on as an artist and attended artists' workshops and symposiums around the world, where he worked alongside an international cross-section of painters, sculptors and other media artists, including the late Sir Anthony Caro and the American abstract painter Larry Poons.
