Spring Foliage and a Blue Door

In the present lot, Hitchens has typically highlighted and picked out details of the landscape with white and pale blue lines of paint. Hitchens would often leave areas of primed canvas unpainted in order to further heighten the painted areas, and this technique can be seen here. Hitchens himself discussed this, 'the white areas or lines of white canvas are to provide channels isolating the areas of paint so that these can be felt relatively to each other in their shape, area, weight and meaning ... The intention is that the spectator's eye can travel along these areas ... over the picture surface instead of being engulfed or drowned in a morass of paint representing or aping realism' (see P. Khoroche, Ivon Hitchens, London, 1990, p. 86). Hitchens' method of creating the illusion of spatial depth in his paintings without applying conventional perspective demonstrates his concern with abstraction and a very modern response to his surroundings.