Where to Buy: Tom Hammick at the Eagle Gallery
This newexhibition ofthe painter and sought after printmaker Tom Hammick is dominated by the superb NOCTURNAL – in which paintings are seen through studio windows from a garden at night.
A row of winter trees is set against a greenish twilight with a night sky behind; the paintings are brilliant in the darkness, suggesting real scenes remembered rather than actual canvases, and there’s the poignant sense of an outsiderlooking in at life andwarmthwhichwas hinted at in Hammick’s earlier, smaller images of lighted trains on nocturnal journeys.
These paintings seem an enigmatic celebration of domesticity, with the garden as setting and metaphor – children earnestly digging; a solitary figure comtemplating the bleakness of three empty seed-beds; companionship and distance. Hammick’s colours have become darker, richer and more sonorous, and that seems to go for the content of this new work too. Prices £950 - £17,000 + VAT 159, Farringdon Road, London EC1 (0207 833 2674). Until 4th October.