Max Hammond

“Our minds are our gardens, to the which our desires are gardeners…”
– William Shakespeare

 

The rugged, varied terrain of Northwestern Utah was the background for Max Hammond’s child hood and much of his adult life. Born in Salt Lake City, he grew up near the southern shore of the Great Salt Lake, an eerie, surreal area consisting of long white stretches of fields and marshes containing saline residue from the lake’s periodic flooding. Hammond recalls jogging along the lake’s salt marshes amidst a landscape punctuated by remnants of a long abandoned housing development. His images and impressions of this environment would later become a fertile source for his art.

Hammond studied painting and drawing at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, receiving a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1988. His undergraduate education stressed realism and the accurate depiction of the figure. Hammond’s early work focused almost exclusively on realistic landscapes and representation of the figure, which included studies in anatomy and muscle structure. In contrast he became increasingly drawn to the expressionistic work of artists Cy Twombly, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollack and Nathan Olivera and from there began to explore the visceral and emotional qualities of the painted surface.

He continued his studies at Arizona State University, earning a master of fine arts degree in 1992. A year before graduation he was awarded the Nathan Cummins Travel Fellowship and armed only with a small day pack, pencil and sketch book spent three months traveling through some the most volatile areas Central and South America. Hammond’s travels exposed him not only to the raw colors, textures and patterns characteristic of the regions indigenous art, but in a more personal sense, exposed him to the vulnerability, loneliness and fear of traveling alone in a hostile country. In retrospect, he views the intensity of his experience as an important time of fermentation and growth, which has deeply influenced the direction of his work.

Mythology and symbolism of the garden are some of the inspirations for Max’s work. Titles make references to ideas Max is interested in. For instance the title, a serpent in the garden, a snake in the grass makes oblique reference to the Garden of Eden and also suggests something more foreboding. Here, it seems, more primal forces have overtaken the traditional order of the garden. Large, intense spans of brilliant color dominate the canvases. His dramatic color combinations, influenced by the raw beauty of the dessert and sensuous quality of water, implies the presence of opposing forces.

Hammond’s intricately layered abstractions combine a personal narrative with the formal elements of light, color and paint texture. The narrative, while almost completely obscured enhances the emotional quality of his compositions. Often, Hammond superimposes fictional and autobiographical references in the form of pictographs or symbols. Simple marks such a lightly inscribed “r” or “c” (his daughters’ initials), geometric shapes, and other childlike marks are evidence of the artist’s personal annotations. Other less innocent form and figures reveal themselves intermittently throughout the painting surface.

Although these ambiguous references are important, they are not essential to understanding his work. Philosophically, Hammond side-steps attempts to understand his paintings on an intellectual level preferring instead to rely on the emotional association which color can evoke. The painter Sam Francis once wrote “Color is the real substance for me, the real underlying thing which drawing and line are not.” Through color, Hammond amplifies the psychological undertones of his work, creating paintings that alternate between whimsy and a darker state of mind.

- Debra L. Hopkins