“My very personal story begins in the early years after the second world war, somewhere above the soot-grimed streets of Birkenhead. It's hard to imagine now, after the age of coal, just how blackened every public building, every church, every monument, and every dullened red-black brick terraced house was, in the industrial north.

The terraced street was broken by one house which had a garden to one side in place of a house. In this garden was a garage, and in the garage was a hearse. Mrs and Mr Cliff, the chauffeur of this hearse were consequently people of a little standing. This house appeared opposite ours over the dark green of the dusty soot-laden leaves of the privet. And above this shone the candelabra of the chestnut, magnificent as it shed its blossom to the wind in a breeze mixed with late unseasonable snow. The sky was blue. This, one of only two trees in the long length of our terrace. The length is accounted for by my years. They must have been three. The other was again a soot-black finger full of branches, stretching up towards whatever light there was. And on this gnarled blackened cane suddenly a yellow set of startling sherbet-yellow lemon lanterns. It was a laburnum. Sweet rationing was starting to fade.

These were the shock of vision that left my heart in its continually unsteady state. Art later came.”

The lively and distinctive paintings of Birkenhead-born abstractionist Pete Hoida (1944-2023) trade in the dynamics of paint mediated through colour and form. Form for Hoida comes before the diversions of illusion, narrative or descriptive subject. The lifeblood of gripping and visually arresting pictures like 'Rock Ferry Reverb' with its heavily structural upright 'boulders' of strong colour reside in the powerful immediacy of paint to evoke mood, atmosphere and other intangibles in imagery with neolithic associations. The transformative magic and the accidental finality of form establish themselves in this notable instance.

In this example there are shades of the Canadian Jack Bush, early Patrick Heron or the Sussex- based lyrical landscape colourist Ivon Hitchens. Hoida establishes a personal note however when using pictorial architectonics in positing upright colour forms within landscape-defining horizontal formats. In this regard it should come as no surprise that, after leaving his native Wirral in 1958, he later studied landscape architecture in Cheltenham after a short spell at Worcester School of Art as a Malvern-based teenager. This in turn led to employment with the LCC in the capital. Being in London opened the floodgates and by the end of the swinging decade he was enrolled at Hammersmith School of Art's Lime Grove premises and after at Goldsmiths in south east London where he encountered Basil Beattie and Albert Irvin. Also spawned through this milieu was a lifelong association with Deptford and Greenwich artists in general and close friend Scot Alan Gouk, in particular.


Ultimately however it was not the metropolis but rural Gloucestershire that became the artist's base where he raised a family with his school teacher partner Caroline Hislam. He built a garden studio and absorbed the push/pull compositional principles of emigre abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann in canvases like 'Viola' ( 2017), 'Mockbeggar' (2008) - recalling a place on the Wirral - and 'Parkgate' (2020).

Hoida's posthumous showing at the splendid deco Williamson Art Gallery on his native Wirral brings home the informalist power and integrity of a local-born artist who does this region proud. The Williamson's acquisition of 'Uisghé' (2004) for its permanent collection complements and cements the happy occurrence of a display of this notable artist 's work.

© Peter Davies, 2024