The art of speaking quietly

Reviewed: Atlantic Provinces by Tom Hammick is at the Paul Kane Gallery, Dublin until April 21st (016703141)

Tom Hammick's paintings in Atlantic Provinces at the Paul Kane Gallery, are for the most part small, understated pictures which turn on tiny incidents, things glimpsed in passing, details. Form is greatly simplified and colour is flattened out, subdued without being dull, generally mellow, almost creamy, evidently applied with a degree of relish.

There is movement in the images, a sense of before and after, with things depicted moving within or across the picture plane, but the movement is also held in a leisurely, dream-like way. You would be hard put to recognise in all this the painter who established his reputation with big, vigorous, borderline abstracts, owing something to Rothko and inspired by environments of epic bleakness and blankness such as Norfolk and Nova Scotia.

But there, on one wall of the gallery, is a big, ominous, dark study of the sea that seems more in line with descriptions of the earlier work. Making its way across the forbidding expanse of water is the spidery mass of a working ship. Hammick painted it while based in a studio on the south-east coast, looking out over the water while the ferries plied to and fro. But why so doom-laden? He was thinking, he says, of the tragedy of the Solway Harvester, the fishing boat that went down in the Irish Sea with the loss of all its crew.

Hammick originally studied art history at Manchester, "but I always wanted to be a painter". And the academicism of art history seemed to him remote from the reality of art practice. "It was good, though," he says. "It gave me a real passion for things that have remained with me, like medieval architecture, or the kind of minimal quattrocento Italian painting exemplified by Piero della Francesca, and for Titian, but it was a bit stifling. Now that I'm a painter, of course, I thank God every day that I did it, because it means you have this catalogue in your head. Although when I get art books I tend not to read them; I just look at the pictures."

He worked for a time as an assistant to a stonemason on Salisbury Cathedral, then tried to get into Camberwell College of Art. He managed to do so, he says, by a mixture of chance and begging: "At the interview, I really had to beg to get in."

They accepted him and a fellow applicant for one place, "so we had to share studio space for the first year. I didn't mind. I was doing something I passionately wanted to do for the first time ever". He went on to do an MA in printmaking at Camberwell, and print has remained important to him. While at college, he visited Nova Scotia, and loved it ("You feel you're on the edge of the world"). He still goes there each year to teach during the summer. After college, he lived initially in Sussex, where he met his wife, Martha. They moved to London's East End, but are now back in Sussex with two young children.

Looking at his pared-down, low-key treatment of undramatic themes, the Belgian Luc Tuymans comes to mind, and Hammick mentions Tuymans as someone he greatly admires. To judge by his earlier work, he might equally have moved away from, rather than towards figuration. "Well," he says, "either you have the balls to be an abstract painter, to just do it, or you don't. Bridget Riley would be someone I greatly admire, for example. The problem I had with it was that it seems to me that you can paint yourself into a corner. It's comparatively easy to do a reasonably OK abstract painting, but how do you know if it's not OK?" It occurred to him one day that "I'd never been brave enough to paint the figure, to have to deal not just with a flattened-out landscape but with narrative and movement as well."

One problem was that he had established a good market for his paintings, but when he moved on from the style with which he was identified, his audience was slow to follow. "It was very difficult," he says. "Things stopped selling, and it has taken a long time to build up." The change was signalled first in his printmaking "because it's easier to make a good print - it's impossible to make a good painting."

The tiny incidents that make up his paintings he captures in a sketchbook that he carries everywhere. "I don't understand how anyone paints in a figurative way without drawing. I might make a drawing and then, four or five years later, see a painting in it." Not only has figuration broadened his language, he is also more focused about what he is doing. "When you're at art school, there are so many things to paint you don't know where to start. As you get older and grumpier there are fewer and fewer things that interest you, but they interest you more."

The title Atlantic Provinces refers to his drawing inspiration on both sides of the Atlantic - and to the poet Elizabeth Bishop, whose work he loves (and who was raised, by her grandparents, in Nova Scotia).

"Her last collection was called Geography III," says Hammick. "There's a poem in it about a sandpiper, hopping along the shore as the ocean comes and goes. If the paintings could get one tenth of that quality she has, of speaking quietly, I'd be happy. People find it hard to look at paintings now unless they're screaming about sex or death or violence. But then you have to ask, is it a good painting or just that its subject matter grabs your attention? One way to find out is to avoid the sensationalism."