Tom Hammick

Although it is usually straightforward-looking in its finished state, his work in Pro Tem at the Paul Kane Gallery is characterised by its reflective consideration. He aims to distil a mass of complex material into as simple a form as possible, and his paintings, with their blocks of intense colour and their spare, stylised drawing, somehow manage to conjure up not just specific scenes but a whole world view.

Hammick was born in Wiltshire in 1963. He initially studied art history and then trained as a stonemason for a while before returning to college, this time to study fine art at Camberwell, where he went to complete an MA in printmaking. One gets the sense of someone with a general feeling for what he’s aiming for but not a precise idea. That came into focus along the way. Now Hammick lives in East Essex and also spends time in Nova Scotia in Canada. He first visited and worked there some years ago, and the experience was transformative.

His art is humane in its detail and its generalities. That is, the images he makes are inspired by small, unremarkable things in life – unremarkable but vital and cherishable. Collectively, those images sketch out a much bigger picture, relating to what it is to be alive in the world, to questions of what is valuable and important and how we might fruitfully engage with our surroundings. All of which might sound a bit preachy and didactic, which is not the case. We can infer all this from the work not because Hammick sets out to sermonise, but because his work seems to honestly reflect his own experiences and sensibility.

The broad view emerges most clearly in pieces that stem directly or indirectly from that original visit to Nova Scotia, pieces that frame the individual within vast settings of woodland, landscape and the limitless reaches of the night sky. Scale is central, because much of Hammick’s work is close and intimate, even domestic, in its concerns, and the omnipresent awareness of these successively greater spaces situate the human subjects in a cosmic rather than a domestic frame of reference. This isn’t to diminish the significance of the domestic. On the contrary, it underlines its importance in the scheme of things.

A striking number of Hammick’s paintings feature the hours of darkness. The little Night Pylon , for example, is a beautifully poetic image, almost abstract. Sea Wall features a starlit expanse of water and a lone figure. Perhaps Hammick relishes night-time so much because it brings the stars into play, opening out the stage. It also emphasises another recurrent preoccupation, which is the idea of the homestead, a comfortable refuge in the darkness. In Norman’s Bay , the pattern of a house’s lights against the night reads as a Mondrian-like composition, a paean to order, light and the creativity that is specifically addressed in the Night Studio paintings, in which the branches of a tree spread out symbolically into the sky. The heart of the show is contained in studies of vegetable beds, one colourfully emblazoned with images arranged in orderly rows, like a display of seed packets. It’s an optimistic image, expressing a Candide-like view of realistic contentment.

The week
2008
Where to Buy
Tom Hammick at the Eagle Gallery

This new exhibition of the painter and sought after printmaker Tom Hammick is dominated by the superb NOCTURNAL - in which paintings are seen through studio windows from a garden at night. A row of winter trees is set against a greenish twilight with a night sky behind ; the paintings are brilliant in the darkness, suggesting real scenes remembered rather than actual canvases, and there's the poignant sense of an outsider looking in at life and warmth which was hinted at in Hammick's earlier, smaller images of lighted trains on nocturnal journeys. These paintings seem an enigmatic celebration of domesticity, with the garden as setting and metaphor - children earnestly digging; a solitary figure comtemplating the bleakness of three empty seed-beds; companionship and distance. Hammick's colours have become darker, richer and more sonorous, and that seems to go for the content of this new work too. Prices £950 - £17,000 + VAT 159, Farringdon Road, London EC1 (0207 833 2674). Until 4th October.

The Times
September 6, 2008
Top Five Galleries:

Francis Bacon; Tom Hammick; Jan Van Huysum Rachel Campbell-Johnston
1. Francis Bacon A magnificent retrospective of this greatest of postwar British painters puts our human flesh in the gladiator’s arena. l Tate Britain, Millbank, SW1 (www.tate.org.uk/britain 020-7887 8888), from Thur, ongoing, £12.50
2. Tom Hammick A soft veil falls over familiar visions as colours fall into patterns that evoke feelings and moods in the canvases of this most atmospheric of painters. l Eagle Gallery, Farringdon Road, EC1 (www.emmahilleagle.com 020-7833 2674), from Sept 10, free
3. Cyy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons A wonderful retrospective of the superlative American modernist. l Tate Modern, Bankside, SE1 (www.tate.org.uk/modern 020-7887 8888), until Sept 14, £10
4. Jan Van Huysum Nature preserved in all its perfection by a master of 18th-century Dutch still-life painting. l Dulwich Picture Gallery, Gallery Road, SE21 (www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk 020-8693 5254), until Sept 30, £9, concs available
5. Violence and Sensation A complement to the Tate retrospective explores the legacy of Francis Bacon in the work of painters who present the same vivid sense of violent experience, featuring works by David Hockney. l James Hyman Gallery, Savile Row, W1 (www.jameshymanfineart.com 020-7494 3857), until Oct 4, free

The Independent
Thursday, 18 September 2008
Lonely figures on the path of life
Reviewed by Sue Hubbard
Tom Hammick: Holding,
Eagle Gallery, London
(Rated 4/5 )

It is the colour one notices first in Tom Hammick's new paintings: the midnight blues, the searing yellows and vibrant reds. The first painting in the show is tiny; an apparently felled or fallen pine lies darkly silhouetted against an inky evening sky, flushed by the blaze of a sinking red sun. It is a highly romantic work. The little pine, alone in the great wilderness of nature, seems to embody a sense of isolation, and evokes something of Caspar David Friedrich, that archetypal German Romantic painter, whose subjects stand on the edges of cliffs and mountains, their backs to the viewer, staring out into the empty void as if searching for meaning.

Hammick has always been a strong colourist but here his colours bear little relation to the natural world – less even than in his earlier work. His stormy purples and deep, slightly toxic oranges and saturated reds contribute to a sense of dreamlike otherworldliness, suggesting, as did the German Expressionists, a direct connection with the artist's emotions translated onto canvas. As in the Fauvist paintings of André Derain, or Kirchner's sickly yellow Bathers in a Room, painted in the early 1900s, Hammick uses colour to evoke states that are at once haunting and uncanny, ominous and tender.

Isolated figures in fields, a mother and child, or a single man digging a garden are recurring motifs. Marooned in flat plains of intense colour, these essentially lonely subjects seem to connect to something elemental and atavistic. Because often the newly dug vegetable and flower beds – painted in solid blacks and browns – look more like empty graves than fertile patches for growing flowers or food. An achingly lovely blue tree, sprinkled with pink almond blossom, spreads over these dark pits in Three Beds like a beacon of hope. To label these religious paintings would be an overstatement, yet implicit in this work, with its strange little figure lying in one of the black rectangles like an Indian widow in a red sari committing sati, is, I think, the notion of some sort of resurrection and an enduring relationship with the cycles of nature.

Pattern forms an important part of Hammick's work. It is as if he is deliberately taking on that guru of Modernism, Clement Greenberg, who wrote in 1957: "Decoration is the spectre that haunts modernist painting, and part of the latter's formal mission is to find ways of using the decorative against itself."

As in Matisse, Hammick's canvases are enhanced by the tension between the decorative surface and the figurative elements. A talented printmaker, he has been influenced by Japanese woodcuts and masters such as Hokusai. This fusion between the simplicity of the Japanese print and his symbolist colours evokes a similar sense, found in Rothko and Barnet Newman, of "secular spirituality".

There is a quiet poetry in Hammick's work that stands in opposition to much of the noise and brouhaha of the current art scene. He begins with what is local and known, depicting the land and seascapes around his home in East Sussex. Unafraid of being beautiful or emotional, or of speaking with authentic feeling, these paintings of lonely figures looking out across moonlit fields, or standing isolated, as in Path, on a green ground contemplating the narrow way ahead, seem to suggest the transience and fragility of human existence.

A small canvas, in blacks and deep blues, of a bend in a night-time road, shows the reflective chevrons pointing into the haunting darkness ahead. Everything is silent and still. There are no figures, no cars and, one feels, no noise. The painting evokes, with great pathos, what awaits us all. For as TS Eliot wrote in "East Coker": "O dark dark dark. /They all go into the dark,/The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,/The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,/The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,/Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,/Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark..."
To 4 October (020-7833 2674

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Observer and Guardian Newspapers
Nov 2005
Tom Hammick: Travels Through Newfoundland
Eagle Gallery, London

A three-month residency courtesy of the Canadian Arts Council in Newfoundland and Labrador has to be an artist's dream come true.

Well, provided you're the outdoor type. British artist Tom Hammick has responded with a variety of work that conveys both the grandeur and the intimacy of the landscape.

The work is figurative and some of the canvases are so large that some of them had to be unmounted to ascend the Eagle's crooked staircase. A green fishing boat chugs across an inky sea under a black sky. In the foreground a jetty is outlined in a brilliantly anchoring red line. This is Outport II, its style reminiscent of Craigie Aitchison in its horizontally banded planes and subtle colour gradations.

His night pictures are his most powerful: in Motorhome (Night) a chunky vehicle, lights ablaze occupies the foreground, safe and sound against a pink-streaked night sky.

There's also a stunning gold-spattered night sky in one of the series of small etchings and drypoints - many scaled-down echoes of the big works but with a more intimate feel.

The country’s huge remoteness is vividly portrayed in his pictures of little huts, dwarfed by their surroundings. Particularly memorable is Shack - a tiny white hut alone in a grey-toned banded landscape that shrieks of cold.

The Independent
October 2005

Eagle Gallery, London
(Rated 4/5 )

Tom Hammick is one of those rare artists who appeal to the uninitiated and the sophisticated art viewer alike. This is his sixth solo show at the Eagle Gallery in Farringdon, in which he revisits his love of the Canadian wilderness - a landscape that was the subject of his first exhibition with the gallery in 1995.

The recent paintings and related suite of etchings and dry points are the result of a three-month residency at The Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador(AGNL). During his stay, he visited the national parks of Terra Nova and Gross Morn, as well as many of the remote costal areas along the eastern shore, the sort of locations that many have come to know through E Annie Proulx’s evocative novel The Shipping News.

Hammick celebrates the raw quality of this remote landscape. There is a sense of time standing still and of older rhythms being unpicked that once underpinned lives dependent on the now diminishing stocks of cod and crab. His paintings convey not only the dramatic terrain but the frontier mentality of existences heavily dependent on the transport of boats and trucks to impose civilisation on to brute nature.

Ordinary venues, such as a gas station set behind tall pines, are transformed into lyrical poetic spaces. A trawler appears wedged between a mushroom-coloured hill and solid pink sea like something out of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, while a truck parked in a lay-by, set against a pink ground and surrounded by icy green trees, evokes the sort of magical realism often associated with the Canadian artist Peter Doig.

Hammick reflects the sense of quiet decay of lives lived on the edge and the loss of traditional skills that have given way to industries such as tourism. Colour and space dominate. He favours velvety midnight blues, flamingo pinks, and cool greens and greys, a palette not dissimilar to that of the Scottish artist Craigy Aitchison. In this environment of lakes and forests, of extreme weather,the landscape still has power to dominate the little, isolated homesteads that nestle in the crook of hills or by vast lakes. These lyrical works explore man’s place within the scheme of things.

This is as close to the sublime as a modern figurative painter can get without becoming sentimental. A tiny green fishing boat, isolated against a navy sea and sky, where the horizon line is denoted by a thread of pale blue and the quay by a single brown rectangle outlined in pink, becomes a Thoreau-like metaphor man’s relationship with the wilderness.

A skilled printmaker, Hammick investigates the interplay between the graphic line and printmaking, interweaving media to explore his subject matter so that a painted image inspires the etchings and dry points, while the contours of a woodcut will find resonance in a painting.
S.H.