JOHN HITCHENS; PATTERNS OF SEEING – Paintings Past and Present at Moncrieff Bray Gallery

28 MARCH – 18 APRIL 2026

Saturday 28 March and Sunday 29 March open 10am – 6pm

Thereafter Tuesday to Saturday, 10am – 4pm

EXHIBITION OPENING PARTY SAT 28 March 4pm – 6pm

The early paintings in the exhibition, such as Selsey Marshland demonstrate John Hitchens’s remarkable talent as a young artist. They highlight his ability to organise complex compositions and to depict light and shade through broad, expressive tones.

From 1968, Hitchens focused on the expansive views from the edge of Duncton Hill, overlooking the Sussex Weald. He established an open-air studio at this location and returned repeatedly over the next nine years to capture the changing landscape. The exhibition features ten significant paintings from this period, showcasing his evolving approach to landscape from Lowland Panorama March to more abstract works like Distant Orchard and Fields II.

During the 1980s, Hitchens’s attention turned to the Far Wood at Greenleaves in Graffham. Again, he set up an outdoor studio and revisited the same site, painting in series. The exhibition includes 15 paintings from this exceptional period when he produced highly personal and powerful paintings.

These works are the product of deep visual thinking and analysis as Hitchens concentrates on striking the exact balance of colour, form and space. In a single work, like Far Wood Looking North, one moves fluidly from one perspective to another while playing with spatial relationships, rhythm, and harmony.

Always seeking new modes of expression, Hitchens’s work in the early 1990s took a new abstract direction, focusing on man’s interaction with the landscape. This was partly inspired by flights  in a Cessna in 1990, from Goodwood airport over the Downs. From the air, he observed not only natural landforms, such as contours, riverbeds, and ancient woodland, but also the traces of centuries of human influence—field boundaries, plough lines, fence posts, ancient footpaths, and stubble burning. He moved away from a naturalistic palette, concentrating instead on the formal qualities of a limited range of colours. The final section of the exhibition is dedicated to Hitchens’s later landscapes, which reveal his growing interest in abstraction and the material qualities of the land itself.

Three-dimensional works are also prominently featured. These pieces demonstrate his direct engagement with the physical elements of his surroundings. Among them are paintings created on timber recovered from the devastation of the Great Storm of 1987, as well as sand paintings constructed from layered strata of different coloured sands.

Hitchens was the subject of a major exhibition at Southampton City Art Gallery in 2020, which surveyed his entire body of work from the 1960s to the present day. More recently, his work has been thoroughly documented in two extensively illustrated monographs published by Samson and Co: Aspects of Landscape and Elements of Landscape.

For further images and information contact Elspeth Bray, mail@moncrieff-bray.com

Tel: 07867 978 414      www.moncrieff-bray.com