"I really liked your track and your poem – I think they reflect Hoyland’s late paintings really well! " Maraiga Bailey, curatorial assistant (Exhibitions) Sheffield Museums Trust.

During a creative writing workshop, I was asked to submit words and music to accompany the paintings in the JOHN HOYLAND: THE LAST PAINTINGS exhibition running from Saturday 3 July till Sunday 10 October 2021at MILLENNIUM GALLERY, Sheffield.

The result was initially a poem inspired by Hoyland's engagement with a Zen death poem accredited to Gizan -

Coming and going, life and death: A thousand hamlets, a million houses. Don’t you get the point? Moon in the water, blossom in the sky.

His very last painting, completed three months before his death, carries the title Moon in the Water, and I decided to use it as a starting point for my own work. A blossoming in the sky concept became symbolic as ever present in Hoyland's last paintings in one form or another. I also wanted to explore the idea of death and zen.

I imagined gazing up at the sky under a cherry tree at the blossom but I wanted a play on words to turn blossom into a verb, indicating, perhaps, a soul leaving a body on death and blossoming into its full and free self. The constant images of cosmos and large circles of light and bright colour in Hoyland's last paintings seemed to represent this explosion and release of a kind of blossoming.

Hoyland's method involved laying down a dark ground with a paintbrush, on top of which he’d skate glazes of iridescent paint. Working on the floor, he’d spill, pour, squeeze and squirt liquid acrylic from an army of bottles. The critic Andrew Lambirth described this method rather aptly as ‘collaborating with chaos’: as Hoyland told him in a 2008 interview, ‘I like to try and make these pictures paint themselves. The less you impose, the fresher it is. Painting is a kind of alchemy.’

Similarly, I laid down some soundscape synth sounds in my compostition and recorded text, chopping up the vocal recording and moving sections around in the composition, letting parts fall where they may. I felt a close affinity with Hoyland's technique during the process and certainly felt like the composition was forming itself. It was indeed an alchemical process and a very satisfying way of working for me.

Synth sounds were carefully chosen-
a pad sound with birds in the distance to refer to Hoyland's use of bird motifs which were mostly in the past now (distant)
a celestial pad sound to represent zen meditation, angelic hosts etc
an artificial beating heart sound to represent his heart paintings
The work as a whole was created as a soundtrack to the experience of observing the paintings so I was thrilled to be told that a QR code to the work would be created so any member of public could listen to it while observing the paintings.

The original piece created to accompany the exhibition is 7 minutes long and the version here is reduced to under 3 minutes being a much more accessible remix.