Metal relief pioneer Vincent Hoisington’s daughter Karen returns to art after 30 years

SINGAPORE – Even among parent-child artist duos, Karen Hoisington can be said to be especially close to her late father.

Photos show her and her three brothers dabbing indiscriminately on aluminium art pioneer Vincent Hoisington’s canvases in their Margoliouth Road bungalow in the 1960s, preparing the imprimatura, the translucent base layer of his paintings.

“When I woke up, a picture would have emerged and he would be quietly playing his Chopin,” Karen recalls of a typical morning with her musician-artist father from her Commonwealth flat.

In 1972, her 48-year-old father suffered a heart attack and died in her arms. Then aged 16 and alone at home while on vacation from her studies in Britain, she remembers feeling “no emotion” as she dialled for help.

She would oversee his outstanding commission for the Cathay Building in Handy Road, but was helpless to stop her mother from handing thousands of his sketches, models and early metal sculptures over to the karung guni in the aftermath.

“It still breaks my heart. It’s so important. Every time someone asks if there are any sketches or maquettes, I’m sad to tell him or her we don’t have those anymore. All my works are now numbered and serialised,” she says.

The 70-year-old today is riding a second wave as an artist after a 30-year interlude as a high-flying, award-winning art director for advertising and branding consultancy Ogilvy and then as founder of graphic design firm Datum Branding.

The allure to leave art then was irresistible. Brands desperate for those fluent in pitching to a global audience meant she counted among her clients electronic payment service company Nets, Asia Pacific Breweries, the Youth Olympic Games in 2010 and department store Tangs.

“A very good time,” she says understatedly of these gloriously hectic years.

A materialist like dad

Her new career means her father is fresh in her mind again – and the born-again artist, who just gave up her studio in Pasir Ris to “work from home”, continues to run the online Hoisington Galleries, with plans to convert her new abode into a hybrid gallery space.

This takes a leaf from the original home gallery founded by her father, who lived to see just two months of operations, then kick-started with donated works from sculptor friends Ng Eng Teng and Merlion sculptor Lim Nang Seng.

Though her father and her may be operating over half a century apart, Karen characterises them both as materialists who have “fallen through the cracks”.

Like her, he was a bit of an outsider and found little comfort in art societies and clubs, taking influence from the West without contemporaries’ close focus on local themes. He worked mostly on commission, which meant the self-taught artist’s paintings, murals and sculptures often disappeared from public view and offered curators and scholars little means to establish his place in Singapore’s early oeuvre.

His painting Civilisations, now in the National Gallery Singapore, resurfaced only after the estate of personal friend and lawyer Rosalind Ratnam put them on sale in 2019. Its industrial polyurethane paint and turpentine fit an artist who freely employed unconventional materials such as spray paint and walnut stains.

On her part, Karen is resurrecting a technique she partly inherited from him – styrofoam sculpture. “I collected a lot of styrofoam in the last two years. I know how to manipulate the material. My movers thought I was crazy because they take up so much space.”

Re-entering the art scene meant she had to benchmark herself against others, unable to build on her momentum while represented by the now-defunct Della Butcher Gallery in the 1970s.

Her last exhibition before she pivoted was of abstract pastels that she rubbed into paper with a meditative technique, which she has reified into acrylic on canvas so that her works will better stand the punishing humidity of Singapore and be “museum-grade”.

Sales before painting

In 2021, she was shortlisted in the UOB Painting of the Year competition. “That gave me a hint to go in this direction.

“I am still trying out different gels with the acrylic that can recreate the translucency of my pastels. I had to learn how to stretch canvases. It’s psychologically new to me.”

There is a wry humour to the way she talks about art in this new millennium. She remarks of a new series inspired by chinoiserie: “I really do love to try more Chinese motifs, but purists will say I’m fake, right? Appropriation.”

In other moments, she is refreshingly direct, scoffing at her paintings four years ago. “My newer works are already not so obvious, not so literal.”

As a one-woman outfit, she has stayed hungry and adaptable. She uses digital tools to conceptualise and exhibit works online, which she then transposes to canvases after a sale. This saves space – “the accumulation of canvases is depressing”– and allows for personalisation by buyers.

She admits an artist of her father’s stature might not have fathomed such a concession, but she says: “They just knew he would wow them beyond their expectations. Because I’ve been in the commercial space, we have clients whom we collaborate with. They also feel proud to have a say in the work.”

Karen has always taken pride in her family name – her grandaunt is war heroine Elizabeth Choy. Her father’s willingness to take her on his meetings with studios, contractors, patrons and clients has also given her a lasting, intangible advantage from a young age. “I was never shy to shake the hand of the big man.”

By 2027, she wants to launch a coffee-table book based on her research and memories of her father. “My early media exposure was partly because I was his daughter.

“Some people still remember the name Hoisington, but it’s a whole new generation now. No pressure means it’s my own time and my own target,” she says with some whimsy.