Gary Hume , the painter , born in 1962, was one of the generation of British artists who graduated from Goldsmiths College, London, and came to prominence in the early 1990s. He first received critical acclaim with a body of work known as the ‘door’ paintings. These minimal and abstracted works, with their high gloss paint and insistent reflective surfaces, developed in the early 1990s into a more fluid and lyrical way of painting. Whilst retaining the surface quality and the flat economic language, his subject matter broadened to incorporate images from popular culture, making portraits of celebrity figures such as Tony Blackburn, Kate Moss and Patsy Kensit. Hume first came to public attention in the seminal Freeze show in 1988, which featured artists such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin who, like Hume, were soon to acquire celebrity status as YBAs (young British artists).
From 1993 he began to engage with a much wider range of subjects including pop icons
Michael Jackson and Kate Moss, images from childhood, such as polar bears, puppy
dogs and snowmen and quasi-
Slick, luscious and droll, Gary Hume's recent paintings bolster his position as one
of London's most compelling younger artists. He exhibited 11 minimally figurative
pictures, all dating from the last two years, rendered in super-
Hume employs an exhilarating array of offbeat hues and indulges in clever textural
effects, which enhance the irresistible appeal of his work. From afar, the compositions
may appear facile and poster like, but, up close, the brushwork reveals itself to
be fluidly applied and surprisingly painterly. When he depicts pretty human faces
and stylishly omits mundane details, the results suggest Warholian portraits of unblemished,
almost featureless glamour pusses. The young woman in Cerith (1997) is little more
than a blank silver face and close-
The scarcely visible face in Whistler (1996), inhabiting an inky black setting, can
be deduced from the presence of olive-
Hume's excursions into outdoorsy subjects are similarly non-
Hume's long, fluid brush stokes often resemble finger painting, as do the two sets
of long, gently curved stripes in subtly muted colours that flank the "eye" of a
large tail feather in Peacock (1996), a nearly monochromatic black painting. In Doves
(1997), five birds with pale peppermint bodies, white eyes and silver-
At Goldsmiths, his contemporaries included Fiona Rae, Matt Collishaw, Sarah Lucas (Hume's then girlfriend) and Damien Hirst, part of a generation of artists that came to dominate British art. At first, remembers Hume, "I was just playing about. I never cared about embarrassing myself with terrible work." It all turned around on seeing a billboard. "Then I saw this advertisement for Bupa or something, and in the background was a hospital door and it looked absolutely perfect and I knew that I could make a painting of it."
His work was a fashionable blurring of the boundaries between image and object, and the art world was suitably impressed. The punters, meanwhile, Charles Saatchi among them, loved the fact that these elegant, mysterious paintings would also look rather good on their walls.
The doors were painted on MDF and aluminium, materials that have since become Hume trademarks. "I found that gloss paint suited me entirely, and its qualities still intrigue me. It's viscous and fluid and feels like a pool. It's highly reflective, which means there are layers of looking. You look at the picture, and you look at the surface, then you look at the reflection in the surface behind you, then you look at yourself." The ordinariness of household paint, a material we can all get our hands on, added another level to his work. Was Hume, who was once sacked from his job as a decorator for being too slow, asking his audience what it means to be a painter?
experimented with layered silhouettes of women in Water Pictures, and more naturalistic,
less cartoon-
He has painted a new version of Moss for the White Cube show, with an unflattering
doodle for a nose. He did Michael Jackson, too, with the same nose, reminding you
of the singer's obsession with plastic surgery. "I tried to be as sympathetic as
I could," says Hume. "I wasn't in any sense trying to ridicule him. I feel for him."
Why Jackson? "The picture chose me -
At a certain point i changed from using canvas to using aluminium as a painting
support. There were technical problems that added to the urgency to change: because
the canvas moves all the time -
Like a car spray shop, constantly repairing surfaces?
So then I was asking around and going to manufacturers, trying to find a suitable material.
Eventually I went to Mike Smith, who works on a lot of Damien Hirst's sculptures and makes a huge amount of artworks. I asked his advice and he suggested aluminium sheets. But when you weld the support bars onto the back of the panels, the heat dents the aluminium so you can't get it flat, and of course with gloss paint you see any fluctuations in the surface. So now the support bars are glued onto the back of the panels with an impact adhesive, and that's what I work on now.
Hume was among the first Young British Artists, or YBAs, to emerge in the BritArt
scene of the 1990s. His degree show, on graduating from Goldsmiths, got him instant
critical attention, and his work was bought by Charles Saatchi. Yet, despite being
one of the best selling artists represented by the best selling White Cube gallery,
he has never had the profile of his peers Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. The explanation
for this is easy enough: Hume is a painter, and in today's climate painting is not
as sexy, or as newsworthy, as a chopped-
Hume claims that he is happy to be out of the limelight, but angry at the media's skewed coverage of modern art. "The most tedious thing is this whole “shocking shit," he croaks. "Constantly. Like the only purpose of art is to shock the public. They try to make anything shocking that isn't shocking at all, and if it isn't shocking then it isn't worth looking at, which is very disappointing, because I don't do anything shocking." His paintings are instead easy on the eye, slick, shiny gloss paint on aluminium panels.
Young British Artists or YBAs also Brit artists and Britart a group of conceptual artists, painters, sculptors and installation artists derived from the Sensation Saatchi Gallery Exhibition.
How to Buy Original Art On E-
Is not quite as simple as you might think! A search in the "Art" category for the
word "oil" in either the title or description gets almost 7,000 hits. We need to
be a little smarter!
Firstly, in what eBay categories might contemporary, fine art
oil paintings be found? The seller could reasonably place such a painting in any
of the following categories:
* Art:Paintings:Modern (1900-
* Art:Contemporary
Paintings:Other Contemporary Paintings
* Art:Contemporary Paintings:Traditional
* Art:Artists
(Self-
(Note that these are ebay.co.uk categories, unhelpfully,
categories on ebay.com are completely different, see the eBay guide which covers
some of the US categories.)
Unfortunately, only the last of these categories is specific
to oil paintings so we need to search within those categories. Let's try a simple
search within each category for the word "oil" in the item title only. This gives
us the following item totals example-
* 2,228 -
*
204 -
* 732 -
* 1,252 -
So,
in theory there are over 4,000 oil paintings to choose from. Assuming they are all
on 7 day listings, that means we have to look at 571 each day, just to keep up! In
reality, there is some overlap -
There are also some steps we can take to reduce this number further, but some hard
decisions are required. Firstly, we could look at items in the UK only. Overseas
shipping can be very expensive, redress may be more difficult, and many paintings
sourced in the far east may only be painted once you have placed your order. A UK
only search for oil, reduces the number to about 2,000.
We could also look only at
private sellers, as many e-
Unfortunately,
some real world galleries do sometimes put unsold stock on to e-
Another approach is to search for the name of the artists you are interested in.
This is unlikely to find many hits (except prints for very popular artists) as at
any given time there are a very few established artists paintings available. Even
so, it may be useful to create a saved search with your favourite artist names to
run every week or so.
In short, there is no easy way to identify good, fine art original
oils, but some of the following ideas might help:
* Search for "oil" in the listing
titles of each of the categories above as often as you can; order the list by "time-
* Modify your search to exclude the e-
* Run a weekly search
for your favourite artist names anywhere in "art".
* Search for "oil" amongst private
sellers as often as you can; order the list by "time-
*
Watch the e-
*
Put anything that interests you in your watch list
* Enjoy the art you buy!
Gary Hume Green and black Orchid painting on rolled canvas painted with artists acrylic paint. Hand painted copy.
30" x 40" canvas
R.R.P. £179.99
SALE Price £97
Gary Hume American Tan VI Painting on rolled canvas painted with artists acrylic paint. Hand painted copy.
30" x 40" canvas
R.R.P. £179.99
SALE Price £97
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