Tangled Pool no.9

A member of the London group of artists during the 1920’s and 30’s, Hitchens produced paintings of the landscape that were neither strictly figurative, nor abstract in style. He translated his experience of the world around him into a coherent painterly language that described both a sense of place, and its movement.
When his house was bombed in 1940, Hitchens moved to a patch of woodland in the west Sussex countryside. Here, he gradually began to build what would become his permanent house and studios for the next forty years of his life. Distanced from the predominantly political British Art scene, Hitchens home in west Sussex became a metaphor for his isolation from the London Art world.
During his time in Sussex, Hitchens dug shallow ponds around his house to reflect the pattern of trees and sky. Tangled Pool, No.9, is the ninth in a series of ten landscapes with the same subject.  Hitchens explained that the series began with a recognisable house and pool, but gradually he concentrated more on the pool; ‘with a tangle of foliage in front giving a play of dark and light and light on dark, in this case mostly the latter’.