Hare today The moving story behind our cover artist’s current series
A middle-aged woman emerges from the sea, looking longingly at her shoes on the shingle, some way in front of her. A young, yellow-topped girl monkey-swings on a seaside balustrade. A bobble-hatted female figure strides up a snowy path in the mountains, towards the welcome warmth of a chalet. Snapshots of everyday lives, deftly painted in acrylics, on linen. No sense of the who, or the where, or the when. Welcome to the ambiguous, deliciously wistful world of Fergus Hare. And just to think that a few years ago, Fergus was primarily a painter of unpeopled landscapes, crafted in oils, in the open air. And space-scapes, too: an expert at painting the moon. There’s a lot of talk of ‘narrative’ in art, and the word is particularly appropriate in relation to Fergus Hare’s work. Later we’ll look at the way in which he invokes a narrative in the mind of the viewer, imagining the before and after of the moment he has seized, Cartier Bresson-like, in each of his paintings. But first, his own narrative. How did he get to where he is now? And where is he going, with his art? Fergus Hare was born in 1977, in South London, and was drawn to art because his two older brothers were good at it, and he “wanted to be like them”. He’s telling me this in the fine studio he has recently had built in the back garden of the Portslade home he lives in with his wife and two kids. If an artist’s studio represents the mind of that artist, then Fergus is neat, well-organised. In-progress
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paintings are hung on the wall; finished ones are stacked in purpose-built racks, carefully wrapped in see-through plastic. He decorated the room himself, immaculately. Fergus’s mother died when he was 18, after which (actually, he later tells me, because of which) he decided to go to art school. He got a place at Norwich School of Art & Design, on an illustration course. His brother was already studying photography at the same college; he had relatives in Suffolk. During this traumatic period, it was important to be near family. He was heavily influenced by the work of NC Wyeth, the American painter (and Andrew Wyeth’s father) who specialised in adventure-story book covers: “Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, that sort of thing”. He sold the painting he exhibited in his graduate show, a book cover design for Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. This was in 1999, two years after the YBA’s Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy, when catchy conceptualism was king. Fergus’s work, it is quite safe to say, was deeply untrendy. But he didn’t care. He wanted to do his own thing, more interested in 19th-century British landscape artists than selfportraits in frozen blood, or bed-partner memoirs. Constable, Gainsborough, Joseph Wright of Derby. At this point he couldn’t yet make a living from art, so he did so in art. While developing his plein-air landscape style, in his spare time, he took on a series of jobs. He worked in pubs in South London – how many artists haven’t pulled pints? – but also for a top-rung art-handling specialist, 01 Art
