Black Mustard: interview with Tom Hammick by Black Mustard

Black Mustard the art of the interview

issue #5

LIVING ON THE PERIPHERY A WANDERER AND OF THINGS IS CONDUCIVE A CREATIVITY FAMILY MAN TO

Black Mustard talks to Tom Hammick

Talking to artists about why they make what they make leads us towards a greater understanding of what it is to be human.

Tom Hammick (b. 1963)

Tom Hammick’s atmospheric paintings are full of wonder – they make you fall in love with the world all over again. Yet within the wit and vitality of his work one can also detect the solitary soul who is never satisfied with his methods or results. ‘I pray for a longish life,’ he says. ‘So that I can keep practising.’

interview with Tom Hammick

Living on the periphery of things is conducive to creativity Black Mustard: Your paintings demonstrate a remarkable boldness of palette. Can you explain why you are so devoted to colour? Tom Hammick: Colour is key for me. It’s not a particularly British obsession, especially for an ex-Camberwell graduate. Colour was low on the agenda there. I believe that if you get colours right in a painting, things slot into place. It is an intuitive process and you try to get to a point where the painting leads the way, telling you what to put down next. But drawing and structure are also important. What’s going on beneath a colour affects the colour on top, so I never prime my canvas. I prefer the brown of the linen as a base. I tend to start to paint thin, quite dry, with small brushes. The nuances of the colours below really help shift the flavor of those applied on top. The colour is the music in a painting and like in the music of Dvorak or Smetana or Janacek, it conjures up a sense of place, a journey, and helps me travel in time. When it works, the balance of colour is equivalent to the way a smell in the street can take you back in time. BM: Did you grow up surrounded by art? TH: My parents collected lovely work, which had great impact on me. A late 70s Trevelyan with a green sky. A Sheila Fell that was just brown. And an etching by Ben Nicholson of rooftops that taught me about line, and looking, and what to take out as much as what to put into a picture. And a Carel Weight of a man walking over Chiswick

Bridge with a pink sky. A Hockney print of water, and a Frink of a duck in water taught me to love the language of print. My parent’s friends conjured up stories. Growing up I met actors, explorers, and Dad would sometimes pick up hitchhikers. He loved a new face. These people created a wanderlust my head, something I still have. I can’t often afford to travel for real, but I can take myself to faraway places in the studio by reading and painting. BM: One place you have managed to visit is Canada. You did an exchange at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and you were invited back to teach during successive summers. You later became a resident artist at the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador. How did you respond to the Big Country? TH: It was magical from the get go. I had always had this thing for Northern climate. I used to pour over images of Canadian life, from vast bungalows with cookers as big as a house, to heated garages with finned cars and lumberjacks in hard hats in BC, felling giant trees. Jack London was a hero, and Canada seemed to me to be a place where you could still be a man, doing male things. The elements still frame life and death. Elizabeth Bishop was brought up in the Maritimes, and many of her poems conjured up a deep passion for the place. And the language of Newfoundland is more Elizabethan than ours. Look at car language for instance: a bumper is called a fender, a pavement a sidewalk. You step on the gas to overtake, are protected by a windshield, store supplies in brown paper

Smoke 2, 2014

interview with Tom Hammick

Dreams of Us, Nocturnal, Paintings seen from a garden, 2011

bags in the trunk, and you pop the hood when you need to check the oil. There is also an ephemeral sense there, with houses plonked on the surface of the earth’s crust. That infrastructure could be wiped away at any moment by the weather. Life seems so much more fragile there, but human spirit so much braver and more epic as a result. There is also a transience about the place I like to dip into, as an antidote to being here. A nation of people on the move for work. Communities sending out their children to work in the cities. People not thinking twice about driving a hundred miles to a party or packing their worldly goods into a U-Haul truck and driving off into the sunset. BM: Now you teach at Brighton University’s Faculty of Art. Do you enjoy teaching? TH: I love it. There is nothing more exciting than seeing someone you’ve taught grow and become independent. Also, while I hope I give my all to my students, I can steal things from them sometimes! Teaching is a reciprocal process. Going round the studios also keeps me in touch - much more than I

would be if I were alone all week in my own studio listening to the radio. A few teachers changed my life at Camberwell, especially Trevor Jones, and I feel this is my way to pay him back for the inspiration he fed me. Part of my responsibility as a teacher is to help students reach a critical moment where they have enough inside them as source material and inspiration to get them to a place where their ideas and interest are self perpetuating. Painting and printmaking students can’t be expected to come up with their own practice all packaged up at such an early age. So we look at how all sorts of artists paint. You learn as much that way. I mean, you wouldn’t want to get involved in someone’s writing if they didn’t read any other writers’ work. Drawing is key, so I encourage students to draw all the time, which is tough in an age of instant photography. Drawing helps one deconstruct an image, memorise an experience, and edit the world. It’s much less impossible to make a painting from a drawing as source material than a photograph.

Motorhome 2, 2014

Paradise in a Green Garden, 2014

interview with Tom Hammick

Semi, 2013

BM: You studied for a BA in Fine Art… What did you learn at art school? TH: The tutors at Camberwell taught me that it was crucial to have ideas behind your pictures. Even if they were post the painting of the piece. Content. Now I think you shouldn’t force it, but at the time it was useful. Take my gas station painting [Filling Station, 2013]. The painting works in several ways. On the one hand it is a painting about being a hillbilly family in a truck – that’s the narrative. From another angle it is about the impotence of being tied into a gas economy. The gas station is an altar. It’s like Dorothy arriving at Oz with great expectations. There is nothing more exciting than the vision of a gas station when you are on the road and running out of gas. These things lit up at night are sexy. The company is Exon Mobil. They own the world. Even the moon is branded in that

picture. They own everything. So it works in lots of ways. Narratively and politically. I try to say something with my paintings. Look at these two figures in ‘onesies’ [Semi, 2013]. This is a dystopian image about what we now do to amuse ourselves – we indulge in porn and wear ‘onesies’. It is a fantasy world that the characters in my picture live in. An antidote to the Orwellian monotony of existence. Except it is just as mundane and predictable and sinister. Making art is polemical and about the self and feelings too. What I do is try and make work about our time. Something makes it contemporary. All the best work in a period is about that time. Turner painted about his time. Stubbs about his time. It was modern at the time. The wagon and cart and gig with horses was the latest thing. I try and tell my students – don’t be pastoral – put in the plastic bucket, the pylon. Make it about our time.

Filling Station, 2013

BM: Your wife Martha appears in many of your paintings. Is she your muse? TM: Yes. I have always drawn and painted Martha. I know how she stands and looks. I can either try and make work about things other than family or allow my wife and children to invade my mind and come into the work. I choose to do the latter. BM: Where do you live? TH: We now live near the border of East Sussex and Kent, between Hastings and Battle. It’s quite a scrubby place – a hillbilly area, with lots of people chancing it without planning permission, living in stables and caravans. Small fields over-grazed by horses. We used to live in the East End of London, but living there with a family and painting full time is too expensive, unless you are extremely successful. Between London and

here, we used to live in Lewes. But it didn’t work for us there. As an artist, you either live in London or you live in the sticks. We live in a tiny old thatched cottage with a funky modernist extension, surrounded by about eight acres. I worried about it at first, but I adore it here now. It is home, something I have never felt before in my life. This place is a form of edgeland. And as an artist I think living on the periphery of things is conducive to creativity. These sorts of places have always been attractive to me, whether it be Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Donegal or in the country near Hastings… BM: How do you find the time to paint with your family all around? TH: I work hard at night. One of the blessings of having children is that you can re-live

interview with Tom Hammick

Martha, 2013

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your childhood. I love reading to them, for instance. It links me to my childhood. Last night I fell asleep on Elsie’s bed while we were reading A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley. When I woke up I watched Match of the Day with Charlie (we are both season ticket holders at Arsenal), then I went out in the night to the studio at the end of the garden. No telephone, no emails, no visitors. I seem to have always worked best between 11pm and 3am. Without natural light, the paintings have a stage lighting sort of feel. I paint under neon strip light and look back to the house. BM: Is that why so many of your paintings are starlit? Why the only light in them glows from the inside of faraway houses? TH: Yes. And the interior light thing, boxed in, compartmentalized, is a sort of modernist device. A figurative Mondrian device. Quite filmic. Lynchian. A Peeping Tom situation. It gives the painting it’s own light source. Flat and abstract. I am not interested in shadow. When I had this show at the Brighton Museum I asked the staff to black out the gallery in this delicious indigo paint and to black out the windows to re-enact the setting of my night studio. So you got slabs of colour coming out of the darkness. The whole thing was quite theatrical – like the way the Timothy Taylor Gallery exhibited Craigie Aitchison’s show not long ago, or the way Chris Ofili has shown his work in muted spaces so you can see what’s going on. BM: Some of your paintings convey this aching sense of isolation… TH: Perhaps one’s work is a reflection of one’s character. My work has often been described as lonely and sad. I’d call it melancholic rather than lonely. I identify with that lonely state though. You can find it anywhere. The paintings of Edward Hopper, for instance, usually with women… Framed windows of cheap hotels and bedsits. These images are still around us when we visit certain areas of London. Trips I remember

in my youth through Earls Court had the same feel of utter desolation. Dormitory zones. There’s a steely core I have that can soak up the need for reflection and wanting to be alone, but I am also a party animal, needing after hours in the studio, to go wild socially, wanting a fix of booze and a highoctane chat. BM: Is your resilience – that steely core - related to your early experience of being sent away to boarding school, do you think? TH: Perhaps. It was a shock being sent away at eight – the contrast between an idyllic boys own childhood with my family in rural Hampshire, where we explored the countryside on bikes for miles and miles without any parental supervision, to incarceration in a dormitory of twenty-five in a school called West Downs – a red brick Victorian gabled pile on a hill overlooking Winchester. I was bereft away from home. I wore my emotions on my sleeve and got seriously bashed in for it. The teasing was ferocious and the fights gladiatorial. But the school was run by a brilliant eccentric called Jerry Corns and his band of psychologically damaged WWII veterans, so it was a place charged with mystery that fuelled an escape into an imagined world that was nurtured by authors like TH White, CS Lewis and CS Forester. BM: Tell me about your parents… TH: Mum used to be drop dead gorgeous, people would literally stop in the street, and even wolf-whistle at school when she came to pick me up. And my father was very cool in his tailored Savile Row suits. Mum is complicated and much less gregarious than my father, a magnet though for her beauty, and he had great charisma and style. A man of extremes. They were a very attractive couple in the middle of square happy Hampshire, wishing intellectually they were in London. Whilst loving each other they had a very mercurial relationship. They were both too damaged

interview with Tom Hammick

Shack, 2005

Past Rolling Downs, 2011

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Island, 2014

in the end and it was acutely painful witnessing their inevitable breakup. But despite their fuckedupness, they were kind to us, and we were always deeply loved, though my Dad could rarely show it in an obvious way. Mum was, is, a novelist, and wrote in a smoke filled room, cooked delicious pasta, meat loaf (can you believe it now?) and gave us incredible freedom. Dad was in the army, but after a massive coronoary, they set up a bookshop together in Farnham. He worked hard, but adored children when he was around. He held court, and the house was always full of visiting friends on bikes, crashing out for the night. It was a very happy childhood at home. Utter bliss. There were horses (not my thing) and dogs, and long walks and a massive walled garden and an early Georgian house that my parents put together slowly with

little money over seventeen years. Their bookshop, Hammicks, was a great success, the Waterstone’s of its time. And I worked there in the holidays, reading all the time, especially poetry. BM: Are you much of a writer yourself? TH: Painting, like poetry comes from a germ. An idea and feeling. But connecting to the germ is a nebulous process. Many poets want to be painters and painters want to be poets. I read poetry a lot, but I can’t write it. So difficult. I’m getting less bad at writing but I am a late developer at over fifty! It’s also to do with putting the hours in and I guess I haven’t. My literary influences are mostly North American - Chandler and Hammett, for example, Cheever, Ray Carver, Richard Ford, Alice Munro, Atwood. But I’m also

interview with Tom Hammick

Path, 2013

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influenced by a large range of painters, and opera, theatre and film. Scenes in a play or opera can be like paintings that distill the action into an image that alludes to time, what went on before and what might be to come. Chagall’s painting The Poet Reclining (1915) has this quality. That pink sky, the emerald green of grass, the dark fir trees against the sky. So beautiful and poignant. Chagall painted a parallel universe, which suspends my disbelief. Is the poet in another place dreaming of this simple peasant scene from his childhood of a shack and a horse and pig? I think so. It’s a great device, like a thought bubble. BM: Can you imagine a world without art? TH: I can imagine it, but it’s a horrific Orwellian world. Or like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. I had an argument with a Tory MP at a party recently. She said that she and the council had cut arts spending and that people needed jobs more than art and that government funds should go into job creation. Art tells us stories about who we are and how we could live and it reminds us of where we’ve gone wrong. It opens up the world to us. Without art, you have no access to that transformative and reflective experience. I asked the MP, “When did you last go to a play?” And she said, “Not since I’ve been an MP.” I s aid, “What are your frightened of?” She said, “Art’s not relevant”. I left the party. Art is more relevant than anything. At least she should see that art generates work and money. I am artist in residence at English National Opera. At ENO, there are all these different tradespeople making things happen – carpenters and wig makers and painters and electricians. It’s like an ark. They could float away and they’d be a utopian self-sufficient community. Art does that. It brings people together.

of fingers. It is like meditation. I crave that feeling every day. I am lucky to know that sensation, to know what it’s like. I have a place to go to. How lucky is that? But anyone who says, “Oh it must be lovely painting every day, you must feel so satisfied.” Well, you want to shoot them, don’t you? What a load of rubbish. Most of the time painting is hell. Pure shit. But my God, those occasional moments when something clicks are pure joy - even though the next day you realize it’s total shit and you have to scrape the thing back. There is always the chance that you might pull something off and make a painting that lives on its own, that radiates energy, that just is. When you do that... that’s not a bad thing to do in life. BM: What would you hope that your paintings say? TH: I want to make the world a little brighter - light up the corner of someone’s room. I want you to see the painting and for it to give you energy. Maybe even take you on a journey. It is an uplifting mission. Maybe my paintings are too specific at the moment, too prescriptive. I want my paintings to breathe more. I pray for a longish life so I can keep practising. They say you have two periods of great creativity – you are full of bravado when you’re young and then later, you can have another burst of bravado but with the benefit of practice and knowledge. Look at late Matisse, late Titian. Late Iris Murdoch. I could never say Salinger was a great writer, because he didn’t write enough. I think you need to play the long game. Late work can be wonderfully inventive.

BM: Are you happy when you are painting? TH: When you are drawing there is that relationship between the brain and end

interview with Tom Hammick

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves.â&#x20AC;? Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (1903)

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