JOHN HOYLAND is widely considered to be one of Britain's greatest living abstract painters. But while confidence does not seem to be a problem for this seasoned 73-year-old artist, he would be sure to disagree with such a statement. For he would not describe himself as an abstract painter at all; he prefers to call himself a "non-figurative painter".

"There's something about the word abstract that is toof abstract, " he explains. "It sounds kind of cold; I don't think anything is really abstract except geometry.

I mean, there's no geometry in nature. I've been trying to get away from geometry . . . my work has got a lot more organic."

An exhibition of Hoyland's work, currently on show in Hillsboro Fine Art's impressive new gallery space on Parnell Square, demonstrates how he has managed to achieve this. While featuring some earlier works, the majority of the paintings are recent. These works, although abstract in the sense that they are non-representational, are oozing with associative possibility.

Brightly coloured, richly textured and teeming with undulating forms, loose circles and flickering, bird-like shapes, they evoke the rich, wildness of nature and the vastness of the cosmos. Favouring quick-drying acrylics over oils, he also manages to integrate high painterly control and harmonious balance with the chance effects of splattered, dripped and thickly daubed paint squeezed straight from the tube.

These works are a long way from his earliest paintings of the 1960s, when he became known for highly formalist, abstract paintings stripped of all associative meaning and focusing instead on a balance of geometric form and colour. Indeed, his recent retrospective at the Tate in St Ives was called 'Trajectory of a Fallen Angel', suggesting somewhat cheekily that, over the course of his 40-year career, he has rejected the hallowed world of reductionism for a more expressive, sensuous use of paint and form that allows for the chaotic, worldly entry of allusion and suggestion.

Hoyland's work has undergone many transformations over the years;

he is continually reinventing approach and embarking upon surprising . . . and exciting - imaginative departures. "I take risks and jump in the dark, otherwise I get bored, " he says.

"People say, 'oh you're works changed again', but I'm not really aware of it."

On the morning I meet Hoyland, he has just come from having a pint of Guinness. With his Yorkshire accent, grey spiky hair and casual denims, he cuts a decidedly down-to-earth figure.

And yet there is nothing casual about him. He exudes an intense passion, enthusiasm and uncompromising attitude towards his work. Likewise, his significant position within the world of 20th century art is signalled by the many major figures whose names he weaves into our conversation:

Robert Motherwell was his good friend "Bob", Anthony Caro is referred to as "Tony"; Rothko was "not a happy bunny", and Barnett Newman "liked to pontificate".

Born in 1934, Hoyland grew up during the second World War, attending art school rather than grammar school and later studying at the Sheffield School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools. While studying in London, he saw an exhibition of the work of Nicholas de Stael, as well as 'The New American Painting', a group show featuring the abstract expressionists, in 1959. Such influences inspired his early forays into abstraction. But when his graduate show took place in 1960, the then president of the RA was not impressed. "The president of the RA, Charles Wheeler, who was a terrible Victorian sculptor, had ordered my work off the walls. . . I wasn't going to get my piece of paper, " he recalls. It was only through the intervention of another lecturer that he eventually received his diploma.

This was not to deter Hoyland, however; indeed, he was soon at the forefront of a new breed of English abstract painters. During a 1964 trip to New York, he came into direct contact with the abstract expressionists, and later lived there periodically from the late '60s until about 1973. Meeting the likes of Motherwell, Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler and Newman had a major impact on his painting, and he began to integrate the ambitious scale and simplified vocabulary of the abstract expressionists with a European appreciation of colour.

Motherwell in particular became an important mentor. "I'd become without realising it trapped in a bit of a formalist straightjacketf I felt the limitations of it but it was very hard to get out of it without abandoning the principles of structure, colour and flatness. But he always emphasised the importance of poetry and communication with other people's ideas."

Hoyland began to take notes, drawings and photographs of everything and anything that interested him, while also letting a wide variety of interests inform his work . . . everything from African art, Japanese calligraphy and Indian art to the writings of Borges and the art of Miro and Van Gogh. Allusion and reference started to creep into his work, and he also began to give his paintings titles.

In more recent years, his travels have led to new departures in his work. "I go a lot to the Tropics, and I'm a bit scared . . . life seems less valuable there; it's the violence and the power of nature, man against nature, man not always in harmony with nature. . . Nature is stronger there, that's what attracts me."

His intuitive yet controlled method of painting has been influenced by these experiences. "I don't really paint these things, I try to induce them and use the paint the way nature works - when you seen water running over a stone, or a stain on the side of a tree, or a tree with an orange parasite growing on it."

Hoyland sees his paintings as similar to music . . . something that can never quite be explained. "You can't explain everything in lifefYou don't have to explain nature, you just have to look at it and you're overwhelmed by it. So painting is about recognition. You can't explain music. You can analyse it, but at the end of the day it's how you respond to it, how you recognise it. Painting is like music in so far as music that has no feeling is rubbish. Painting has to have real feeling."

'John Hoyland: Selected Paintings' continues at Hillsboro Fine Art until 5 May