Pete Hoida is one of the most important abstract painters of his generation. Born in Birkenhead in 1944, he was on the London scene in the 60s and early 70s, and has painted from the hillside of his isolated Gloucestershire home since 1974. Hoida’s uncompromising vision of art, and his pursuit of that vision without regard for changing tastes and fashions, can be daunting to the uninitiated, and is too easily taken for granted by the initiated. Neither reaction is justified.

At his recent exhibition of new paintings in Cirencester (September 2006, Ashcroft Modern Art), the immediate impact on each and every visitor walking into the gallery was the impact of colour: the vibrant, saturated phenomenology which simply happens to us behind the eyes. The mediate impact which followed was both conceptual and cultural, as uninitiated viewers wondered about the intentions and technique of the artist, and initiated viewers tried to evaluate the paintings according to formal criteria and historical precedent.

 

He 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 Hoffman and Nicolas de Stael's velvety tachism, Hoida arrives at an intensely personal synthesis, resonating with landscape feeling.”[6] Or as Alan Gouk puts it[7] “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…”