Archive Frederick Hammersly

Catalogue Essay | Images from the Exhibition Frederick Hammersly Home Page | Spring 2007 Archive

Hunches, Geometrics, Organics:
Paintings by Frederick Hammersley

	Frederick Hammersley Deja View #3, 1996 Oil on linen 30 x 30 inches

“Hunches, Geometrics, Organics: Paintings by Frederick Hammersley,” presents six decades of work. The title is drawn from the artist’s characterization of his mature work as either hunches (1953-59), geometrics (1959-64 and 1965-90s), or organics (1964, 1982-present). This exhibition explores the complex interactions of these distinct but interlocking bodies of work. What unites the artist’s work across these three categories and over half a century is the artist’s profound commitment to and understanding of the logic of intuition and the pleasures of painting and looking.

An early hunch painting “Up Within,” painted while at Pomona College, introduces the exhibition. In the hunch paintings the artist started with an initial color form and intuitively completed the rest of painting, adding more forms and colors. The geometric paintings grew out of a series of small lithographs completed in 1949-50—on view in the South Gallery—in which Hammersley worked within a nine-square grid. Predominantly black and white, geometric paintings develop from decisions the artist makes about shape and color within the grid format. For each of the nine squares, the artist decides whether or not to introduce a color and a diagonal. In the finished compositions, the underlying grid often disappears. Hammersley creates the geometric paintings with a palette knife, producing a smooth and almost flawless surface.

In contrast to the geometrics, the organic paintings employ no rules or straight lines, with curving natural forms and blending colors. Also, in contrast to the geometrics, he uses a brush for the organics, leaving visible brushstrokes. They differ in scale as well; geometric paintings may reach 48” square, while most of the organics are rectangular and smaller than twelve inches. The geometric paintings begin in the artist’s notebooks—where only a few are selected for larger canvases—while the organics begin directly on a canvas as the interplay of drawn shapes call forth other shapes. When he recognizes the balance and relation of shapes as complete, he turns to color, each color determined by the preceding.

The geometric and the organic paintings differ significantly, yet enhance and relate to each other. Both are characterized by openness to where perception leads and the recognition of the “rightness” of the picture. The work proceeds from the accumulated understanding and experience of form and color, balance and scale, which comprises the artist’s intuition. As Arden Reed points out in “Seeing Hammersley Whole:”

…the mainspring of this production has been pleasure…pleasure is discovered and proved by intuition: what ‘feels right’ or ‘feels good’ determines every mark. Corroboration lies in the viewer’s satisfaction, in the sense that the shapes could not be otherwise arranged, and that the colors belong to those shapes, although not in ways we could have predicted.

Frederick Hammersley was born in Salt Lake City in 1919, and moved to Los Angeles at the age of 21 to attend Chouinard Art School. After serving in the Army from 1942-46 and studying briefly at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris in 1946 (where he met Brancusi, Braque, and Picasso), he returned to Los Angeles to complete his studies at Chouinard and Jepson Art School and taught at both schools in the 1950s. In 1953 he joined Pomona College as Visiting Professor of Painting where he taught until 1962. In 1968 he left Los Angeles for Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he taught briefly at the University of New Mexico (his early experiments with computer drawings while at UNM are on view in the Main gallery), and where he resides.

Kathleen Howe
Sarah Rempel and Herbert S. Rempel '23 Director

Rebecca McGrew
Curator