I am Smitten: The artwork of Vincent Hawkins
September 20th, 2010 § 3 Comments
Social networking may keep you up all night, it may take a bite out of your perceived productivity but occasionally it opens a window into another part of the world you had never known of and in this case into an artist studio my eyes have never known of.
I discovered Vincent’s artwork through a secondary network. Brian Cypher via Tim McFarlane. Brian made a East coast trip and visited Tim, thus I was exposed to Tim’s FB and blog / website. Tim posted some of Vincent’s work which I instantly felt a kinship with. I have begun a friendly correspondence through social networks with Vincent, I think he will be a little shocked that I am blogging about him, we have never met, he lives in London and we have only had a few correspondences.
When I first saw Vincent’s painting the words “yes” gushed from my mouth. I had until recently been painting in a similar manner, but much less successfully than Vincent in my estimation.
‘’ I Changed My Mind ‘’ 55 x 45 cm . Acrylic on canvas . 2009
It posed a interesting question to me: What do you do when you see someone’s work and you kinda wish you had painted it? Or at least paint like it? What do you do when see someone OWN what you have been trying to accomplish? I think it is a very interesting question for artists.
Are artist explorers or we practitioners? Are there territories and cultural ownership? Has the dawn of remix culture and mass-appropriation given license to artists to cut and paste at the cost of personal originality? Is the level of connectivity not know before in history going to homogenize art as we know it? The meme that “it all has been done” is a powerful and pervasive idea, it has given some a licence to borrow or to create new genres of like works. In biology physical distance has given species the space to evolve uniquely in response to the habitat. My hope is that somehow that process of evolution can be transposed into the habitat of artists.
I visited Vincent’s web site. I also like these recent paintings of his. They are dated 2009. He also posted paintings from 2008, and they are less interesting.
So … his paintings are changing.
He started out in 1987. I assume he did not paint like this back then. It will be interesting to see how his paintings have changed over the past 20 plus years.
I wonder what his 2010 paintings look like.
I wonder what led to the change in his paintings from 2008 to 2009.
Now that you have seen his paintings, I wonder how your paintings will be changing …
there is a link to the blog which has been included in this very generous and kind post by Kevin .
Those are great questions Pixo!
It may be artistic narcissism but I think one of the reasons I like Vincent’s work is that has some very similar elements to some of my artwork.
As to how will my paintings change? I really can’t say… You will just have to see
Vincent if you read this go check out Pixo’s stuff. I am sure you will enjoy it.
http://pixohammer.smugmug.com/gallery/4780730_gnAH7