Landscape of a lıfe

West Sussex-based John Hitchens has been making art his entire life. Far from scaling back in his 80th year he has just staged a major retrospective exhibition

- Nione Meakin

One might expect to find John Hitchens in a reflective mood. This year marks the artist’s 80th on the planet and he has a new retrospective open at Southampton City Art Gallery spanning more than seven decades. But the frenetic creativity that has fuelled his career thus far remains undiminished; he has little time for looking back when there is still much to be done.

In his warren of a studio, hidden away in ferny woodland outside Petworth, the shelves are packed with notebooks of ideas yet to be realised. “I’ll never run out,” he says, eyes bright behind thin-framed glasses. “But I may run out of time.” So far from scaling back, he intends to scale up, launching into his largest painting to date this winter. His work has been getting progressively larger for years now and several of the paintings on show at Southampton run across multiple panels. “You have a different physical relationship to the canvas the larger it is. You look up to the painting rather than down on it. It changes your perspective.”

Hitchens has spent nearly his entire life making art, much of it in this same patch of West Sussex. His father, the painter Ivon Hitchens (himself the son of the Victorian painter Alfred Hitchens), moved into a caravan here when he was bombed out of his home in 1940. He later built the studio where his son still works today, each room now an Aladdin’s cave of canvases, sketchbooks, found objects and curious creations. It was his father who presented him with his first paint box aged nine: “That was when I did my first ever oil painting. I loved [oils] immediately.”