Gallery

Tom Hammick

A woman in a skirt the colour of drying blood stands alone against a deep blue ground. Behind her lie two beds of richly painted flowers, each bloom stylized yet botanically identifiable, in formal rows with the patterning of oriental rugs. She is canopied by a cascade of blossoms, apple or pear, her vulnerable back to us. She encapsulates the ineffable loneliness of the human condition, an ordered life behind her but aspiring to an overarching beauty. This theme is repeated in the corresponding woodcut of Two Beds.

In another woodcut, Three Beds, the foreground image is of three unplanted beds, in one of which a child seems to dance alone while a man, father, brother, artist or voyeur, watches to one side. Again they are under a conopy of starry blooms from a flowering tree. In all three pictures earth and sky are a solid ground of colour, against which darkened backdrop the images seem almost to burn.

Yet other representations show the night sky unlit behind a lone building, suggestive of Hammick's visit to Nova Scotia, stables or barns fringed by pine trees, where the human or animal figures, even if they touch, are still apart, and the beauty comes not from lush patterning but from the subtlety of the colours themselves that soften the stylized precise image juxtaposed against them.

Hammick's vision is of a mysterious yet familiar world, sublety arresting, moving and uniquely his.

Maureen Duffy, 2009