Painting is a messy, seat of your pants and nebulous kind of thing.
Tom Hammick
Violetta and Alfredo's Retreat, 2015, Oil on linen ©Tom Hammick
Courtesy of Flowers Gallery London and New York
all rights reserved Bridgeman Images 2018
Can you tell us something about your work in this show and something about how your work has developed over the years.
I like
the way the figures in this painting, while marooned away from the banalities
of everyday life are so wrapped up in themselves, despite their shared island
paradise, that they don't seem they need each other at all. Or perhaps she
needs him less that he needs her as she reads her Neruda and he tries
ineffectually to gather supper?
My work
has slowly become more painterly over the years. I hope my paintings are less
prescriptive, where imagery and titles have become more open ended. This
way they have more chance of conjuring up individual aspects of what it is like
to be human, and any personal narratives they might touch on are completed
by the viewer.
Fallout, 2014, Oil on canvas ©Tom Hammick
Courtesy of Flowers Gallery London and New York
all rights reserved Bridgeman Images 2018
What you find most enjoyable
and/or difficult about the process of creating art?
This is a
big question. How long have you got?
I am
free (sort of) to use my imagination and roam around in my paintings and
prints. What bliss that can be. It's a sort of visual equivalent for me of
writing a poem. When it works. But it never really works, and the lag and gap
between what I see in my imagination and what I end up making is cavernous. But
when you get to the point where the painting tells you what to do- that is
exciting too. You can end up, if you trust it, in a place where the painting is
an equivalent of the intended and imagined image which I am trying to
make and to resolve and explore. But painting is a messy, seat of your pants
and nebulous kind of thing. Nothing much makes sense, and when you think you
have grasped it it slips away. And much of the time you are responding to
an intuition and a feeling so primordial, it's too far from the light of the
everyday.
What would you like to
see the Hastings Arts Forum do in the future?
Smoke II, 2014, Oil on canvas, ©Tom Hammick
Courtesy of Flowers Gallery London and New York
all rights reserved Bridgeman Images 2018
Courtesy of Flowers Gallery London and New York
all rights reserved Bridgeman Images 2018
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