110 x 130 cm | 43 x 51 in
Subject: People
Tags: Movement, Stripes
Original painting in oil on canvas.
"This is the 2nd and largest painting in a series of works made from two short pieces of video, filmed in the yard out the back of my studio in August 2017. By working in series the overall process reflects and enhances the fragmented nature of the individual works and the video stills I work from. Although I view each painting as a distinct and individual entity I also see the whole series as a single, complete piece and I regularly work on two or three paintings at the same time, trying different things out and letting ideas bounce between them."
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Tom Hemming holds the space for transition, or rather, holds space in transition when rendering the introspective moment of a figure, reading or in a garden. The artist works from video footage of his close friends and family, which accounts for these works’ unique look. The trajectory of an observation is persistently rendered, marking the patience which allows the identity of those who sit for portraits to be revealed. An identity which turns out to be multiple and shifting: as much non-identity as identity. Finished works and studies for those works are both available, with the boundaries blurred between the finished, singular work and the unfinished, multiple studies.
These contemporary oil paintings chime with those by Jenny Saville, the Young British Artist as conceptually driven as the others of that famous cohort, but primarily interested in the human form and flesh – and significantly paints from photographs. In Tom’s works the collateral of the image – the ripples in the field of vision – are born from the contrasting metaphysics of the video and painting medium: the former medium that posits the motion of an object, the latter the stillness. The artist combines these with a startling, morphing effect. In his monochromatic works a film of colour wavers between enhancing and obscuring the scene. His portraits are like stills of a movie reel, transposed and transpersonal: the multiple stills overlaid, and splayed like fingers of a hand; the hand that paints motion into stillness and stillness into motion.