Hirst was born in Doncaster, Yorkshire, in 1930. He studied at Doncaster Art School and the Royal College of Art in London, before establishing himself as an artist and lecturer. He travelled extensively, spending extended periods in Catalonia from 1953-1973, where he absorbed the work of Miró, Gaudí and Tapies, as well as visiting Morocco to study Arabic architecture. Hirst held teaching posts in the USA, Canada, and Australia, as well as the UK.
Of all the artists working in England over the past 50 years, only Prunella Clough or possibly Patrick Caulfield has enjoyed such widespread and unconditional admiration from their peers. His work has close affinities with that of Clough, a friend and painter he admired. They shared particular qualities of integrity, and each created an entirely personal world, which they were able to sustain and extend with an imaginative unpredictability.
In 1953 Hirst visited France and, for the first time, Catalonia. This journey had a profound and lasting effect on his work. He saw the cave paintings at Lascaux and was overwhelmed by the sophistication and physical presence of images drawn into the relief and surface textures of the walls, where "image and substance are uniquely joined". In the South of France he also realised how art was often produced out of a strong sense of place. "Seeing Mont St Victoire was to understand Cézanne without the help of any art historian," he said. Catalonia, where he was to spend part of every year until 1973, not only extended his understanding of Miró, Gaudí and Tapies, but dominated his life and influenced his work for the next 20 years.
In 1964 he visited Morocco to study north African architecture. He also continued to teach and hold residences and visiting professorships both here and in the United States, Canada and Australia.
In 1977 Hirst moved his studio from London to Sidlesham, West Sussex, a radical shift from city to country. There he became preoccupied with the changing seasons and the movement of the sea, and by the early 1980s his work had become obsessively focused on the beach at Church Norton, and the mud flats, transformed twice daily by the tide. It is possible that his strong identification with "place" was related to thoughts of imminent death, but he produced a large number of reliefs made from a mixture of sand, PVA and rope and other locally found materials, culminating in the early 1990s with an impressive series of seascapes, entitled Winter Is Hard. These paintings, on the edge between abstraction and figuration, combine relief, texture and earthy, rusty colours over-painted with white. They show a control and mastery of materials and processes arrived at through long and systematic experimentation.
Hirst's work was widely exhibited internationally; in London, after showing successfully at Tooth's during the 1960s, he moved to Angela Flowers. His first show at Flowers' Lisle Street gallery, in 1970, was an instant success. It consisted of seven "armchair" paintings and was acclaimed by important critics, among them Peter Fuller and Norbert Lynton. Flowers, noted for the support and loyalty given to their artists, showed Hirst's work regularly throughout his many difficulties and vicissitudes, and he was able, in 1987, to give up his post as principal lecturer in painting at Kingston Polytechnic and resume painting full time. His final show, at Flowers Central in January 2005, combined colour, surface, texture and relief, and was a fitting summation of a life's work.