W.D. (Bill) Hammond

To see the works by W.D. (Bill) Hammond in the Chartwell Collection, click on the thumbnails on the right.

Hammond's exhibition, Jingle Jangle Morning, at the Christchurch Art Gallery, 2007, was a comprehensive look at Hammond's paintings and included three of the Chartwell works.

The exhibition tours to City Gallery Wellington. 17 November 2007 - 10 February 2008

Notes from www.christchurchartgallery.org.nz:

Bill Hammond is one of New Zealand’s most influential contemporary artists. He was born in Christchurch in 1947 and attended the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts. During the 1970s, he worked in a sign factory, made jewellery and designed and manufactured wooden toys before returning fulltime to painting in 1981.

Birds first began to populate Hammond’s paintings after he visited the Auckland Islands in 1989, as part of the ‘Art in the Subantarctic’ project. The three-week trip to the remote, windswept islands, where the severity of the climate has allowed little human impact on the natural environment was something of a revelation. In an interview with Gregory O’Brien for ‘Lands and Deeds’ (Godwit, Auckland, 1996), Hammond spoke of the islands as a kind of lost world, ruled over by beak and claw: "The Auckland Islands are like New Zealand before people got here. It’s bird land."

Bill Hammond’s compositions encompass humour, beauty, and lyricism while reflecting a unique expression of New Zealand’s cultural landscape. This spectacular exhibition includes early music inspired paintings, as well as Hammond’s Walter Buller series painted after his visit to the sub-Antarctic, through to the startling zoomorphic paintings, ancestral studies and recent work that takes the extinct Giant New Zealand Eagle as its theme.

Hammond’s luscious palette of inky blues, his signature use of emerald green and gold and his endlessly inventive combination of anthropomorphic birds, horses and hybrid creatures will offer viewers a unique insight into the oeuvre of this singular artist.

Notes from www.citygallery.org.nz:

Bill Hammond: Jingle Jangle Morning is centred on the theme of music in Hammond’s work; the title comes from the Bob Dylan song Hey Mr Tambourine Man but is also the name of one of Hammond’s opulent paintings. A practicing musician himself, music has been a constant throughout Hammond’s career and he speaks of his paintings as being like instrumentals “laid out flat”.