Artist Curated: Ten Artworks in Ten Minutes

Artist Curated: Ten Artworks in Ten Minutes
Tom Hammick Curates - Ten artworks in ten minutes

We are pleased to present the third in a series of artist-curated viewing rooms, where a gallery artist selects ten works from our inventory. All we have asked is that they choose pieces that they find engaging, inspiring or thought-provoking.

Our aim is that this distillation will encourage us to look more closely and to see familiar pictures in a new way - helping us to better understand both the works that have been chosen and the artist who has chosen them.

Tom Hammick - Biography
"Artist prints have had an allure for me since my parents bought an Anthony Gross etching of a French railway station set in the heat in Provence back in the 70’s. My Dad even made the hessian mount (full of glued-in acid which I imagine still slowly leaks into the paper to this day) and gilded the home-mitred frame. I was caught up in the flicks and dashes of ink pressed deep into the paper: a sort of three dimensions mashed into two. Lucky to witness as a boy, they bought a Frink cormorant, its webbed feet I imagined so busy churning away under the still water to seemingly effortlessly create such a wake behind it; then added Spenser’s magnificently dryly drawn lithograph of Marriage at Cana where you can hear the chairs scraping back across the floor spiralling out from the centre of the composition; and Ben Nicolson’s etching overlooking St. Ives, with a lone fishing boat in the sky-like sea, suspended above rhomboid roofs.

Then came a Hockney pool, in delicious crayon d'ache colours of blue and vermillion and spring green, and a Chris King abstract. More followed. Cornish settled artists mostly, Wilhelmina Barns Graham, Bryan Ingham and Bryan Wynter. I started to notice my Aunt Amanda’s relief prints after that, especially her tortoise and her magical lino cut of a crazy boy dancing bacchically round a fire with fireworks. This was my induction into print before I was even 13. (The Hockney pool which I later inherited, despite being in an edition of 1000, I sold for my first printing press - which has a nice symmetry to it.)

At school I made my own simple etchings while devouring Hockney’s drawings and etchings in his first monograph, Hockney by Hockney in 1976. And this is where this little survey of my selection of Lyndsey Ingram’s stock starts."
Artworks
David Hockney
Portrait of Cavafy II, 1966-67
'Hockey’s illustrations for Fourteen Poems from CP Cavafy.

'What economy of mark' I remember thinking - and still do. How did he manage to create such a physical three dimensional turn to this beautiful hunk’s chest between the lines delineating the edges of his body ? Again those flicks and dashes, shorter lines for the soft curve of his navel, longer mare's tail lines for his head of hair and curls of pubic bush. I can feel his fingers behind his head and neck, the tightness in his arms, the box of his collar and breast bone, skin tight here against his upper torso. Hockney conveys this young man’s unapologetic confidence and matter of factness of what’s on offer. This drawing as etching, like so many in this magnificent artist book, is the perfect foil to Cavafy’s love poems. And such openly edgy and brave work paralleling Hockney’s bohemian life 40 years later when it was still illegal to be openly gay.' - Tom Hammick
'Snow Pines is too dreamy for words. As an artist who spends a lot of time making prints I can only imagine how exacting it was to make this woodcut. There must be so many plates carved for this print, combined with an incredibly painterly approach to inking them up. I drool over this and Helen Frankenthaler’s other woodcut in Lyndsey’s inventory. They rather knock everything else for six in my book.' - Tom Hammick
Artworks
Kiki Smith
In a Bower, 2015
'Kiki Smith’s 'In a Bower' is a biggish etching of a turkey in a tree. No horizon line, no colour for sky, there is a hint of iridescent hue around its head and neck and beak. It almost looks bruised. Kiki’s cross hatching marks, while the language is very much her own, remind me of those that could have been made by the great Australian artist Sidney Nolan. They have a compositional connection too.

It was such a privilege to have this print above my press even though it was so short lived. A hero of mine for many years, I find her work incredibly moving and subtle. She is a re-inventor of imagery, part myth, part fairytale, with a direct connection to both the animal kingdom and the human condition: animals anthropomorphised as humans and as corollary, mostly female humans tenderly depicted in their animal like suffering. Here this turkey is free from the Thanksgiving dinner table and instead seems to act as a lookout for some country homestead, high up in a tree as guard, ready to cry out in alarm at any potential intruder.' - Tom Hammick
Artworks
Michael Landy
Scentless Mayweed, 2003
'Michael Landy’s Scentless Mayweed and his Common Toadflax were made two years after his seminal performance piece Breakdown (2001), where in a large disused shop in Oxford Street he forensically catalogued and then destroyed over 7,000 possessions in a sort of reverse assembly line. The bags of shredded refuse from all his worldly goods were refreshingly never monetised and sold to the Art World.

It is tempting to imagine that the chattels of a life reduced to the clothes you stand in might kick-start a very different sort of zen-like art practice. These incredibly detailed line drawings of weeds might indicate the truth in such an assumption. The desire to draw and take note of plants below the radar and ostracised as weeds seems to be a brave and typically ‘Landian’ metaphor and response to uncovering truths in our stratified and hierarchical society. He has drawn them in almost scientific detail, as if he is at last prescribing them a seat at the botanical table alongside more traditionally ‘worthy' specimens.They are deeply poignant images of love celebrating part of the tapestry of life and biodiversity on our planet.' - Tom Hammick
'This little painting is a gem, reminding me of both the late Elizabeth Bishop’s sublime watercolours and the house that Katherine Mansfield lived in before her early death. The light, half tropical, has a brooding intense wet heat to it; pinkish clouds behind, full of electricity are rolling in. The lemon yellow dash of paint as house light is a perfect counterpoint of intensity between the acres of green palm foliage and the candy-floss sky. Her use of violet and cerulean blue and light grey, all mixed with white above the action is good enough to eat. It’s both exciting and quite annoying to be so jealous of a contemporary painting!' - Tom Hammick
'Candy Counter is such a deceptively simple image, but it plays tricks on the imagination. Thiebaud is known for his candy-colours and this stark linocut for me oscillates between black and cream-white and the delicious pinks, yellows, oranges and liquorice blacks each blocked out sweet conures up. There is just enough going on here for one to be transported back to childhood, (if you are of an age when sweet shops were on so many street corners) and the smell of these counters. Technically it is beautifully carved: the negative spaces are edged so one can fill in the gaps to the shapes of the confectionary.' - Tom Hammick
Artworks
Georgie Hopton
Fontainebleau, 2020
'Inventive and idiosyncratic, Georgie has pulled this off magnificently for me. The title and pun around it, 'Blue Fountain', makes me smile. When you break down the mixed media elements within the image it’s hard to understand how it works at all….. three glossy photo collages, all a bit like 90’s postmodern psychedelic wallpaper: one of them of three and four leafed clover, another a detail of grass in full emerald green, and a largish cauliflower shaped pattern resembling purple and baby blue flower heads, or the wicked witch’s sugared roof tiles that Hansel and Gretel eat from before their incarceration. These collaged pieces arranged almost as a rock/cliff face from a Chinese scroll painting, covered and stitched over with a cascading waterfall made from various dyed woollen strings. I can hear and ‘see' the water cascading, and the whole work suspends my disbelief.' - Tom Hammick
Artworks
Peter Doig
Country Rock (from '100 Years Ago'), 2001
'How can I pass by Peter Doig's Country Rock? Made with Pete Kos at Thumbprint for Paragon Editions in 2001. It is a great example of an artist's practice that straddles painting and printmaking mediums, without the latter being a third-class reproduction of the former. Here, like in all the prints he made in this series called 100 Years Ago, Doig twists a photograph by adding aquatinted colours to plate tones mostly derived from monochromatic source material. Here too Doig is re-conjuring a real-life rainbow-painted around the entrance of an underpass in Toronto which become a popular graffitied landmark that was eventually allowed to remain 'decorated' after several years of back and forth contratente around its existence. As far as the image is affected by the process, it is an etching made using post-war silkscreen technology where light-sensitive stop out, rolled onto a metal plate, is exposed from a photograph transferred onto acetate. The process allows acid to penetrate the plate where parts of the image, according to the exposure of tonal values on the acetate, are dissolved to reveal bare metal. This rather clunky use of the medium becomes sublime when Doig sets up a counterpoint to the monochrome by so explicitly adding the heat of colour to one 'targeted' area. For me, it brings up a magic-realist metaphor, even though it is based on something already in existence. It has a Ballardian ring of dystopian truth to it as an image fit for a British Si-Fi cover. And the title, another good use of the pun, brings a certain sad cadence to the piece…. as if to say 'Country Rock no more', this is part of the fabric of the urban diaspora around Toronto.' - Tom Hammick
Artworks
Gerald Laing
Little White Tunnels, 1967
'So good and refreshing, and, like Prunella Clough, such an underrated artist outside the literati end of the art world. This sublime sculpture/relief, transports me back to the 60’s. Even the frame has a clunky sophistication with its side hinges keeping a sheet of glass in place as it rests on its white box. Comparing this piece to American sculptural minimalism of the period recalls to me either Shaw or Wilde's aphorism 'two nations divided by a common language.' The schism between such a playfully wistful title and such hard edged use of metals and plastic conjures up a particularly British tongue-in-cheek wit that the YBA’s later developed in their own bon mots. It’s as if the combination of title and relief-form was Laing’s British answer to Donald Judd’s quite dogmatic 'Specific Objects', essay, which was written in 1964. Judd's text was a call for the new in art, made from commercial materials that should investigate ‘real space’ untethered from the traditional frameworks of painting and sculpture. Laing pulls back from all out modernism and instead straddles the old and the new by sticking to more traditional figure and ground relationships suspended in a frame that stem from the Renaissance.' - Tom Hammick
List of Works
Works Available By Tom Hammick

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Artist Curated: Ten Artworks in Ten Minutes : Tom Hammick

Tom Hammick Curates - Ten artworks in ten minutes

David Hockney

Kiki Smith

Michael Landy

Georgie Hopton

Peter Doig

Gerald Laing

List of Works

Works Available By Tom Hammick

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