By 1999, when he painted Melting Moments II (Lot 31), the work that lends its name to this exceptional sale, Hammond has taken his avian imagery to another level. He has scaled up the size of his canvasses so that the birdhumans float against the ground like a medieval tapestry. They are at once reminders of a lost world of ornithological plenitude and a warning against further degradation of our environmental ecosystem. But to leave it at that is to deny the layered complexity of Hammond’s practice. His pictorial sources include ornithological encyclopaedia and medieval bestiaries—the former done in the service of science and the latter the stuff of myth, wonder and fear. The dripping pigment in the outer two sections of what is essentially a triptych, suggests transience and ultimately disappearance. While in the central section, the bird-humans dance and play musical instruments in a carefully choreographed riot of movement. Fast-forward some eighteen years and we find that Hammond’s inventive powers and sheer painterly brilliance remained undiminished. In works such as Clutch 2 (Lot 30) from 2017, there is jewel-like delicacy to his paint application. The figures are rendered almost translucent by the application of thinned down layers of paint. The bird-humans are elegant and ethereal, like guardian angels in early Renaissance art. They are perfectly positioned on the canvas, their wings and limbs creating a sinuous arabesque across the surface. The smaller scale will appeal to those who find Hammond’s big paintings either too confronting or just too weird. Viewing these four paintings as a group, there can be no doubt of Hammond’s powers of invention and unswerving commitment to the art of painting. Fittingly, Hammond was something of a magpie, taking ideas and imagery from disparate sources. But his unique gift was the ability to reassemble his source material into works that are instantly recognisable as his. Although he famously denied all overtures to “explain” his works, he didn’t need to. He allows, us, his viewers to enter into his Gothic imaginary and to find there our own associations and meanings. That’s what great art is about.
By 1999, when he painted Melting Moments II, the work that lends its name to this exceptional sale, Hammond has taken his avian imagery to another level. He has scaled up the size of his canvasses so that the bird-humans float against the ground like a medieval tapestry. They are at once reminders of a lost world of ornithological plenitude and a warning against further degradation of our environmental ecosystem. Webb's
October
82