I find the wild and the sense of the unknown charged with wonderment. It’s with these experiences that I’ve since realised that my attachment to art comes, in part, from expressing what it is like to be human – a search for a way to make sense of living on Earth.
Tom Hammickfor Pushing out the Boat (2017)
With blurry boundaries, vibrant colours, and solitary figures that drift untethered and weightless, Tom Hammick crafts Romantic landscapes of a world that is both enduring and fragile. Relating his paintings and prints to literary culture, Hammick composes serene scenes, such as Moonlit Field (2024), that deal with the fragility of being human; experiences of love and of loss that colour our lives—an edge borrowed from opera, music, and poetry.
Hammick’s pieces investigate the human condition—sombre scenes exploring loneliness and isolation and devotion. Each quiet feeling is captured through an emotive use of colour and a juxtaposingly vibrant colour palette. They feel almost detached from our present reality, with the glow of his underpaintings and the loose forms of his landscape recalling the waving light of a CRT monitor or the static from a faraway radio. In Hammick’s fuzzy landscapes, humans are set adrift.
The figure in Moonlit Field seems to float through the space; half merged into the landscape: weightless, spectral. The bright underpainting seeps through the seams of the twilight blues, creating a dreamlike haze—like peering through the mist or recalling a dream against the backdrop of your eyelids after waking. The loose silhouettes of the trees in the distance feel as though they were caught in a moment of movement; with the peek of yellows, pinks, oranges, and blues glimmering from behind them, granting the trees the space to sway in the evening breeze until they settle into a comfortable stillness.
Detail of Tom Hammick, Moonlit Field, 2024
The moon is just a slight shadow in the sky, not a beacon of light as typically represented in nighscapes or as alluded to in the title. Instead, the canvas is illuminated by the glowing flora blooming from amongst the weaving grassy hills. Their light is brought twofold by the brilliance of the soft green borders that pronounce them from the grass. It’s as if the stars came down the earth, or the lone man was brought into the sky—it creates a realm which manifests itself to show to only one viewer. This ethereal night scene has devoted itself to the man standing amongst the fields, appealing itself to his solitude, offering comfort and spectacle on an otherwise lightless night. The pensive figure is in a land of his own—unobstructed, outside of human interaction.
At the same time, Moonlit Field holds the potential for an alternative story, one where the figure has stumbled into this dazzling scene, unbeknownst of how the world interacts and blends without mans watchful eye; that he’s caught nature in a moment of privacy, a moment that was intended to be witnessed, a moment outside of expectation. With his hands in his pockets the figure absorbs the landscape, as if in meditation.
At a crossroads of staying and going, of continuing to watch or to turn away, Hammick’s Moonlit Field builds a palpable and familiar tension between embracing and letting go. Hammick’s compositions escape a singular narrative. With evocative titles and faceless figures, he invites viewers to join his subjects in their contemplation, to tease out each potential meaning of the painting
(By Teddy Woods)