Tom Hammick | An Introduction

TOM HAMMICK

TOM HAMMICK

AN INTRODUCTION

TAYLOE PIGGOTT GALLERY

THE COLOR IN THE PAINTING TELLS ME WHAT TO DO

To enter Tom Hammick’s mind is to journey into a fertile garden, where poetry, theater, film, and art history clamor for attention with his daily practice of painting or printmaking. Hammick has one of those deep intellects with the uncanny ability to parse complex narratives into accessible summations. He cites opera, poetry, and Wim Wenders’ films with detailed ease amidst artists Bob Thompson, Peter Doig, Caspar David Friedrich, and Charlotte Salomon as sources of inspiration. Somehow, Tom Hammick makes the world of the mind come alive; his paintings speak of something just beyond our conscious world.

Color is heightened. Color is expressionistic. The color in the painting tells me what to do.”

"You’re lying in bed, and you’re half in dreamland and you’re half waking up. I find that a very fertile time for imagery, where the pictures in my head are half of the subconscious and half of the conscious. Color is heightened. Color is expressionistic. The color in the painting tells me what to do.”

Hammick seeks “that lovely period called hypnogogia, that little bit of time where you’re coming out of your dreams; you’re lying in bed, and you’re half in dreamland and you’re half waking up. I find that a very fertile time for imagery, where the pictures in my head are half of the subconscious and half of the conscious.

An Introduction to Tom Hammick presents a selection of oil paintings and prints ranging from very small to rather monumental in scale. Hammick’s work probes the human condition in pulsating color, pushing the materiality of each medium into a contemplative narrative.

There is an undeniable oscillation between the quietude of the subject matter—a lone figure on the beach, three figures tending a garden–and the artist’s distinctly exuberant palette. We as viewers are left with an electrified stillness.

Perhaps not incidentally, Tom Hammick loves poetry. He cites “The Moose” by Elizabeth Bishop as the equivocal wonderment he attempts to convey in paint: the sweet peas cling to their wet white string on the whitewashed fences; bumblebees creep inside the foxgloves, and evening commences

Bishop’s words expressively capture a moment in time not unlike Hammick’s painting Night Garden. A female figure, her back to us, contemplates a route to a small outbuilding,

through what appears to be an inaccessible path of glowing flowers. It’s an unruly garden highlighted in electric technicolor; her path is uncertain, and she’s caught, like many of Hammick’s subjects, paused as though deep in thought. Moving in and out of the domestic sphere, Hammick captures humans and their domiciles with expressive tenderness. “I suppose as a painter I’m interested in the poetic connection with home, and things being terrestrial (versus extra-terrestrial),” the artist says. He continues, “You know, I hope [the paintings are] about what it’s like to be human… Whether it’s a woman going out to her garden, or two women trying to build shelter, or a man, I suppose me, outside sort of a metaphor of my house or flat or studio, and the color of the night. All these figures kind of going around their daily life, nightly life, almost unaware of, or definitely unaware of, us watching them.” Like the characters in Bishop's

poem or one of Hammick's film synopses, the figures embody a specific moment in time, but are immediately accessible to the human experience.

"...As a painter I’m interested in the poetic connection with home, and things being terrestrial (versus extraterrestrial). You know, I hope [the paintings are] about what it’s like to be human…"

Tom Hammick (b. 1963) is an artist living and working in London. He studied art history at the University of Manchester and later Fine Painting at Camberwell College of Art and NSCAD, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Canada. He has an MA in Printmaking, also

from Camberwell, and until recently taught at Fine Art Painting and Printmaking for many years at The University of Brighton. Hammick is the proud father of three mostly grown children as well as a lover of music, theater, film, opera and poetry, all of which informs his work in a profound and tangible way. His work is held in various public and private collections worldwide, including The British Museum, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven, CT; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; New York Public Library, New York; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Bibiothèque National de France, Paris; and The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. Tom Hammick has been selected to join the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in New Haven, CT as an artist-in-residence in 2023.

Words by Katie Franklin

"THE MOOSE" BY ELIZABETH BISHOP

From narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea, home of the long tides where the bay leaves the sea twice a day and takes the herrings long rides, where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay coming in, the bay not at home; where, silted red, sometimes the sun sets facing a red sea, and others, veins the flats’ lavender, rich mud in burning rivulets;

on red, gravelly roads, down rows of sugar maples, past clapboard farmhouses and neat, clapboard churches, bleached, ridged as clamshells, past twin silver birches,

through late afternoon a bus journeys west, the windshield flashing pink, pink glancing off of metal, brushing the dented flank of blue, beat-up enamel; down hollows, up rises, and waits, patient, while a lone traveller gives kisses and embraces to seven relatives and a collie supervises.

Goodbye to the elms, to the farm, to the dog. The bus starts. The light grows richer; the fog, shifting, salty, thin, comes closing in.

Its cold, round crystals form and slide and settle in the white hens’ feathers, in gray glazed cabbages, on the cabbage roses and lupins like apostles; the sweet peas cling to their wet white string on the whitewashed fences; bumblebees creep inside the foxgloves, and evening commences.

One stop at Bass River. Then the Economies— Lower, Middle, Upper; Five Islands, Five Houses, where a woman shakes a tablecloth out after supper.

A pale flickering. Gone. The Tantramar marshes and the smell of salt hay. An iron bridge trembles and a loose plank rattles but doesn’t give way.

A woman climbs in with two market bags, brisk, freckled, elderly. “A grand night. Yes, sir, all the way to Boston.” She regards us amicably.

Moonlight as we enter the New Brunswick woods, hairy, scratchy, splintery; moonlight and mist caught in them like lamb’s wool on bushes in a pasture.

On the left, a red light swims through the dark: a ship’s port lantern. Two rubber boots show, illuminated, solemn. A dog gives one bark.

The passengers lie back. Snores. Some long sighs. A dreamy divagation begins in the night, a gentle, auditory, slow hallucination....

In the creakings and noises, an old conversation —not concerning us, but recognizable, somewhere, back in the bus: Grandparents’ voices uninterruptedly talking, in Eternity: names being mentioned, things cleared up finally; what he said, what she said, who got pensioned; deaths, deaths and sicknesses; the year he remarried; the year (something) happened. She died in childbirth. That was the son lost when the schooner foundered.

He took to drink. Yes. She went to the bad.

When Amos began to pray even in the store and finally the family had to put him away.

“Yes ...” that peculiar affirmative. “Yes ...”

A sharp, indrawn breath, half groan, half acceptance, that means “Life’s like that. We know it (also death).”

Now, it’s all right now even to fall asleep just as on all those nights. —Suddenly the bus driver stops with a jolt, turns off his lights.

Some of the passengers exclaim in whispers, childishly, softly, “Sure are big creatures.”

“It’s awful plain.”

“Look! It’s a she!”

Talking the way they talked in the old featherbed, peacefully, on and on, dim lamplight in the hall, down in the kitchen, the dog tucked in her shawl.

A moose has come out of the impenetrable wood and stands there, looms, rather, in the middle of the road. It approaches; it sniffs at the bus’s hot hood. Towering, antlerless, high as a church, homely as a house (or, safe as houses). A man’s voice assures us “Perfectly harmless....”

Taking her time, she looks the bus over, grand, otherworldly. Why, why do we feel (we all feel) this sweet sensation of joy?

“Curious creatures,” says our quiet driver, rolling his r’s.

“Look at that, would you.” Then he shifts gears. For a moment longer,

by craning backward, the moose can be seen on the moonlit macadam; then there’s a dim smell of moose, an acrid smell of gasoline.

Elizabeth Bishop, “The Moose” from The Complete Poems, 1927-1979

PAINTINGS

INTERLINKED , 2022

Oil on canvas 78 x 96 inches

SHACK & A PINK TREE , 2021 Oil on panel 10 1/4 x 6 ¾ inches

WINDOW , 2021

Oil on panel

9 1/4 x 6 ¾ inches

NIGHT GARDEN , 2021

Oil on canvas

60 1/4 x 79 ¾ inches

NIGHT HERON , 2020

Oil on panel 10 x 7 ¾ inches

DUSK , 2022

Oil on canvas

48 1/4 x 60 1/4 inches

SMOKE , 2014

Oil on canvas

79 1/4 x 59 1/4 inches

SEA GRASS , 2022

Oil on canvas

61 1/4 × 48 1/2 inches

SHELTER , 2022

Oil on canvas 48 x 60 inches

FLOATING GARDEN , 2016-2019

Oil on canvas

24 1/4 x 32 1/4 inches

CHERRY TREE , 2009

Oil on canvas 25 ¾ x 31 1/2 inches

WALDEN POND , 2018

Oil on canvas

54 1/2 x 78 1/2 inches

PRINTS

VIOLETTA & ALFREDO’S ESCAPE, ARCHIVE COPY I/I , 2016

ISLAND IN THE MOON, E.V. 10/30 , 2019

Edition variable reduction woodcut 16 ¾ x 11 1/2 inches

CLOUDLAND, E.V. 4/25 , 2022

Edition variable etching, aquatint, sugar lift 11 1/2 x 15 1/4 inches

CLOUDLAND, E.V. 19/25 , 2022 Edition variable etching, aquatint, sugar lift 11 1/2 x 15 1/4 inches

DARK WOODS, E.V. 19/25 , 2019

Edition variable reduction woodcut

16 ¾ x 19 1/2 inches

HORSE AND BOY, E.V. 18/25 , 2019

Edition variable reduction woodcut

19 1/4 x 13 1/4 inches

TAMINO IN THE WILDERNESS, E.V. 8/14 , 2020

Edition variable reduction woodcut 46 x 35 inches

RED RUN, E.V. 7/8 , 2020

Edition variable reduction woodcut

60 1/4 x 48 inches

TOM HAMMICK

Born in Tidworth in 1963

Lives and works in London

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2022 Lyndsey Ingram Gallery, London, UK

2020 Gallerie Boisserée, Cologne, Germany 6 November to 11

Paul Smith London, London, UK

2019 Flowers Gallery, London, UK

Glasgow Print Studio, Glasgow, UK 2015 Gallery Prodromus, Paris

2012 Brighton Museum and Art Gallery

Where Where Gallery Beijing

1998

Redfern Gallery, London, UK

Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax, Nova Scotia 1992 Eton College, Eton, UK

SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, Canada

Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Belfast, UK

Biblioteque National de France, Paris, France

Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, Brighton, UK

British Copyright Council, London, UK

British Museum, Collection of Prints and Drawings, London, UK

Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, London, UK

Chinese Fine Art Academy, Beijing, China

Library of Congress, Washington DC, USA

New York Public Library, New York, USA

Pallant House, West Sussex UK

Royal London Hospital, London, UK

The Towner Gallery and Museum, Eastbourne, UK

Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK

Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven, USA

This catalog compliments Tom Hammick's Exhibition AN INTRODUCTION 17 DEC 2022 - 29 JAN 2023 | Tayloe Piggott Gallery © 2022 All Rights Reserved