Page 26 - OSG: James Hamilton: 49 Landscapes and a Big Wheel

I try to find the rhythm in the landscape, and keep things simple. A photograph
or a sketch made on a walk might be a starting point, but memory and the
misremembering of a subject also helps. In the end it is what I find on the paper after
the brush has passed by that gives me the incentive to go on until an image emerges.
This may sometimes be ‘of’ the subject, but just as often, and more interestingly, it
has gathered a life of its own and become a picture which may go its own way in
conversation between paper and brush.
I have been painting since the early 2000s, in parallel with the latter years of a career
as an art historian, biographer, art gallery curator and director, but without really showing
the paintings except to family and indulgent friends, and in local group exhibitions. I held
my first solo exhibition at the Osborne Studio Gallery in February 2022.

The pictures have grown up as antidotes to writing and curatorship, and to my
understanding, such as it is, of eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century painting
in all its variety. One critic has said, ‘your paintings make me happy’. That is pleasing,
and all I need. At 76, I am not retired, but released.

James Hamilton