Philip Hicks
(British 1928-2021)
Philip Hicks, who died on 12 June 2021 at the age of ninety-two, was described by The Times critic and author John Russell Taylor as ‘a brilliant draughtsman’ and ‘an outstanding colourist … Hicks’s art delights for many complex reasons and two very simple ones: that it is beautiful to behold, and above all that it says Yes to life, finding in the most ordinary and everyday something rich and strange, and wholly personal.’
The son of a British Army officer, Hicks was born in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, and educated at Winchester College. In 1946 he joined the Army and passed out of Sandhurst, but was subsequently invalided out of the service in 1949. Though music was perhaps his greater passion as a young man – he was an accomplished pianist, with a life-long love of jazz – Hicks decided to train as an artist, and was soon accepted into the Royal Academy Schools. (Music, though, would influence his work. As he would later observe, ‘Being a fairly skilled musician certainly affects my painting – colour harmonies are all important.’) It was during his time at the Royal Academy Schools that Hicks met Jill Tweed, a student at the Slade School of Art. They married in 1952, and went on to have two children: their daughter, Nicola Hicks MBE (born 1960), is an internationally renowned sculptor.
Hicks first exhibited in 1955 in the Leicester Galleries’ popular series, ‘Artists of Fame and of Promise.’ A solo show soon followed in Cork Street in 1956, and was well reviewed by The Scotsman: ‘this sensitively intelligent artist,’ the newspaper’s London art critic observed, ‘brings a fresh point of view to almost everything he touches.’
For many years Hicks and his family lived in London, where he taught part-time at the Harrow School of Art. Travel abroad took him to Italy, France, Spain and New York, and he developed a keen interest in the Post-Impressionism of Picasso, Braque and Cézanne, and the Abstract Expressionism of Robert Motherwell. Friends among his fellow artists in England would include William Scott, Keith Vaughan and Sandra Blow. His work moved increasingly towards complete painterly abstraction, via a period in the 1960s when he also made metal relief sculptures, exhibiting alongside Jill Tweed. An article in the Arts Review would describe his work at this time as ‘thoroughly modern’ and ‘gently ironic: evolutionary experiments that are solidly based and producing timeless results.’
His series of mixed media pieces, Vietnam Requiem (1968-70), were highly praised by Peter Fuller (who was to emerge as one of the leading British art critics of the period). In Fuller’s opinion, the strength of Hicks’s Vietnam series was that, ‘without a trace of the banality of social realism or the unsophisticated primitivism of propaganda art, he has vigorously engaged his sensibility as a painter with the psychology of the individuals who are engaged in this particularly savage and significant war.’ Hicks donated most of these paintings and structures to the Imperial War Museum, and also presented a series of screenprints on the same theme to the Tate Gallery in 1975. A major retrospective of his work followed at the Battersea Arts Centre in 1977, and in 1979 he was one of ten prominent British artists invited to work and exhibit in Israel.
In 1990 Hicks and Tweed left London to settle in rural west Oxfordshire, and in 1996 he had the first of a number of exhibitions with David Messum. His works from the mid-1980s onwards increasingly included the rural motifs for which he would become best known, and which looked back to his early life growing up in the English countryside: sheep, fish, trees, birds, butterflies, boats and the circles of the sun and the moon, often settled in fields of carefully considered colour. In 2009 he would explain how he grew ‘very fond’ of sheep, ’as creatures, as characters, which they are, and the paintings which resulted had a high degree of loose reality which hid the abstraction involved in the colour and placing of the images.’ In his 2013 biography of the artist, John Russell Taylor would write how, just under the surface of Hicks’s late work, there runs ‘a preoccupation with the essence of Englishness – an England of historic sea-faring, bounding, exploding Spring, ancient rituals at the summer solstice, primeval stone remains continuing to dominate parts at least of the landscape.’
Hicks was a lifelong supporter of the Artists’ General Benevolent Institution, the charity founded in 1814 by members of the Royal Academy of Arts to support artists in need and their dependents. He served both as Chairman and Vice-President.
Philip Hicks, born 11 October 1928, died 12 June 2021
