Painter Derek Hyatt, was born at Ilkley in 1931. His home town and region had a profound and lifetime influence on his work as a landscape painter. Whilst his style tended to the abstract, particularly in later life, he claimed that he did not have a style, only a subject: the Yorkshire countryside. He told the local newspaper:
Since childhood, I have always found the moors to be full of shifting colours and unexpected feelings. Once through the stile in the wall and onto the open moor I am instantly into the world of imagination (Bradford T&A, 23.3.2001).
‘Yorkshire Landscape’. Image: Paintings in Hospital/Art UK
Derek studied at Leeds School of Art, 1948 -52 and later, during his National Service, attended classes part-time at the Norwich School of Art. In 1954 he gained a scholarship to the Royal College of Art (RCA) and later won the Royal Scholar prize and J Andrew Lloyd Scholarship for Landscape Painting; his student and later work was influenced by the landscapes of John Nash. He edited ‘Ark’, the prestigious RCA journal, during his time at the RCA. He was a contemporary and long-term friend to another Ilkley artist, John Busby.
‘Ancient Moorside’. Image: Government Art Collection/Art UK
Derek taught at Kingston School of Art (1959-64) and was a visiting professor at the University of Cincinnati during 1980. In 1968 he returned to Yorkshire to lecture at Leeds Polytechnic (now Leeds Beckett University) School of Creative Arts and Design, where he stayed until 1984. He lived in Yorkshire for the rest of his life; his home was at Collingham, near Wetherby, where he died in December 2015.
His work has been shown at many group exhibitions, including ‘Images of the Yorkshire Landscape’, Leeds, 1990. Solo exhibitions of his work have been staged in Yorkshire, Edinburgh, London, and overseas at Tampa, Florida. In 2001 Cartwright Hall, Bradford, staged a retrospective of four decades of his work, and the Art Space Gallery in London showed a number of his paintings in 2012 and again in 2014.
‘1st December, 1973’. Image: Bradford Museums & Galleries/Art UK
He was made a Companion of the Guild of St George (1990) and a member of the International Artists for Nature Foundation (1995). His works is owned by both corporate and public collections, including those of Bradford Museums and Galleries, Balliol College, Oxford, Leeds and Harvard universities, the New York Museum of Modern Art and the Financial Times.
Bibliography:
Derek Hyatt – Meetings on the Moor: The Bishopdale Painting by Andrew Lambirth and Michael Richardson. Catalogue of an exhibition held at and published by Art Space Gallery , London, 2012. ISBN: 9780957150232.