Tom Hammick: Wall, Window, World

Description

This is the first book to survey the work of painter and printmaker Tom Hammick (b.1963). It sets Hammick's art within the context of contemporary debates about painting while relating it to the two-centuries-old Romantic tradition. Julian Bell explores in depth the artist's working processes, imagery and career to date, arguing that Hammick's work constitutes one of the richest imaginative achievements in late 20th- and early 21st-century British art. Many of Hammick's pictures respond to the landscape of South-East England, where he has spent much of his life. Others are inspired by his encounter with the wilderness of Canada's remote maritime provinces, a regularly revisited imaginative resource that has given his work much of its distinctive flavour. Hammick has spent three periods in Canada: as both a student and later visiting lecturer in Painting and Printmaking at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax between 1989 and 2002, and in 2005 after being awarded a residency at the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador, now called the Rooms. Informed by the author's sustained contact with Hammick over many years, illustrated with over 120 carefully selected images, and produced in close collaboration with the artist, Tom Hammick: Wall, Window, World will appeal to the artist's collectors and wide popular audience, as well as students, art-world professionals and painting enthusiasts. It is available also in a special edition incorporating the three-part colour etching Fallout, created by the artist specially for this publication in an edition of 60.

Julian Bell is a painter who has written two books about historic artists, Bonnard (1994) and Vincent van Gogh (2015), and two more general art texts, What is Painting? Representation and Modern Art (1999) and Mirror of the World: A New History of Art (2007). Bell regularly contributes essays on art and allied subjects to the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books and The Guardian. He teaches at the Prince of Wales Drawing School. As an artist, Bell exhibited jointly with Tom Hammick and Andrzej Jackowski in Dreams of Here, a well received show mounted by Brighton Museum and Art Gallery in 2012.