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Revision as of 00:00, 8 September 2011 by RjwilmsiBot (talk | contribs) (→External links: Adding Persondata using AWB (7822))(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)| Bill Hammond | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | New Zealander |
| Education | Ilam School of Fine Arts |
| Known for | Painting |
William (Bill) Hammond (born Christchurch, 1947) is a New Zealand artist.
Hammond attended the School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury from 1966 to 1969, and has worked as a full-time painter since 1981 (in between times working as a toymaker). His paintings feature two common themes - reference to popular music (often in the form of the liberal use of quoted lyrics within the structure of the paintings), and gaunt creatures with avian heads and human limbs. Hammond's canvases make liberal use of the flow of paint, with rivulets of colours running vertically down the backgrounds. These dark canvases, coupled with the anthropomorphic bird forms, have led to comparisons with the likes of Hieronymus Bosch.
His best known work is probably the 1993 painting "Waiting for Buller", which pays reference to the noted ornithologist Walter Lawry Buller.
Artist influences and themes
Lyttelton artist William (Bill) Hammond spent the 1970s working in design and toy manufacturing, returning to painting in 1981. Hammond’s work tackles social and environmental issues, conveying messages about humanity and its status as an endangered species.
Endangerment Hammond has looked back into New Zealand’s environmental history for his subject matter, drawing inspiration from the study and attitude of Sir Walter Buller. The well-known Buller paintings reveal some of the grim ways in which birds have been forced to relate to us. Hammond has read widely on the perverse practice of Victorian ornithology. Walter Buller’s ‘A History of the Birds of New Zealand’ with illustrations by John G. Keulemans, provided a source of inspiration for some of these paintings. Buller was a prominent lawyer and ornithologist, whose studies of native birds are still regarded as definitive today. He believed that the native people, plant and birdlife would inevitably be rendered extinct by European colonists. Although he was involved in campaigns to protect some species of bird, Buller did so reluctantly and continued to collect specimens for his own research. In paintings such as Waiting for Buller, Hammond moves away from mutated forms and renders the birds in a painstaking, accurate manner reminiscent of scientific illustrations.
Birdlife Birds in all cultures across time feature in creation myths, sagas, parables, liturgies and fairy tales. They have come to represent among many things, the realm of the spirit world. They are harbingers of both fortune and evil, and in dream mythology they represent the personality of the dreamer. Shape-shifting, zoomorphism and anthropomorphism too are recurrent features found in stories both old and new and Hammond has invented his own range of hybrid bird, horse, human and serpent figures that change and morph before our eyes. A major shift in Hammond’s practice came in the early 1990s after he returned from a trip to the remote Auckland Islands, where there are no people and birds still rule the roost. Inspired, Hammond imagined himself in Old New Zealand, before even Māori had arrived.Environments under threat, the vulnerability of life in a precarious world and complex relationships between Māori, Europeans and nature are expressed through Hammond’s strong graphic ability.
Techniques and processes
An enormous range of references that encompasses everything from folk art, popular culture, Renaissance art and architecture, ancient Assyrian and Egyptian art, decorative arts and Japanese woodblock prints, through to an impressive knowledge of New Zealand history can be detected in Hammond’s work.
Ancestors Hammond’s Ancestral paintings are like underwater or forest scenes – all floaty golds and greens, with sea serpents and sea horses, lush foliage and reefs. Amphibious birds and winged fish pose in choreographic union surrounding ancestral figures finely decorated with fern and leaf patterns. These ancestral figures though perhaps represent Tāne, (God of the forest, all creatures) ancestor in Māori mythology of both man and bird. Reaching further back into the ancient world of Egypt and Assyria, Hammond’s version of Horus Lord of the skies is in fact the extinct giant New Zealand eagle. Narrative stone bas-reliefs from Nimrud, in particular Protective Spirit in Sacred Tree 875-860 BC, depicting a winged eagle-headed magical figure, inform these paintings along with burial sites, rock drawings, moa in pre-historic New Zealand (prey for the giant eagle), and the shape of the landscape in and around Banks Peninsula.
Composition Hammond’s paintings show a collapse of foreground and background that provides a sense of infinite space in the art of traditional Chinese painting and Ukiyo-e. Often reminiscent of Italian Renaissance painting and tapestries, Hammond’s compositions combine a graphic ability with delicate decorative qualities.
Auckland Islands trip The three-week trip (part of the ‘Art in the Subantarctic’ project in 1989) to the remote, windswept islands had a significant impact on Hammond. The Auckland Islands, where the severity of the climate has allowed littlehuman impact on the natural environment, was something of a revelation. In an interview with Gregory O’Brienfor ‘Lands and Deeds’ (Godwit, Auckland, 1996), Hammond spoke of the islands as a kind of lost world, ruled over by beak and claw: “The Auckland Islands are like New Zealand before people got here. It’s bird land.” Pre-historic New Zealand has been one abiding interest for Hammond, who imagined himself in a primordial New Zealand before the arrival of humans. He developed surreal paintings of birds-becoming-people influenced by ornithological illustration, colonial topological landscape painting, comics, children’s books, history painting, Hieronymous Bosch, Grandville, Max Ernst’s Lolop and, crucially, Buller’s Birds.
Patterning The intricate textiles of the Middle East and Asia and the effects of golden filaments embroidered on clothing and metallic backgrounds stamped onto fine fabric are echoed in Hammond’s embellishments.
External links
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