Summary
Hume’s Portraits is a series of ten screenprints commissioned by Charles Booth-Clibborn and published by him under his imprint, The Paragon Press, London. They were proofed and printed at Coriander Studio, London in an edition of thirty-six plus ten artist’s proofs. Tate’s copy is number eighteen in the edition. Each print was made using between three and fifteen colours and coated with several layers of varnish in sections. The varnish results in a sheer, glossy surface similar to that achieved by Hume’s use of household gloss paint in his paintings such as Incubus 1991 (Tate T07184) and Water Painting 1999 (Tate T07618). The prints are based on paintings Hume made between 1994 and 1998. Some of these paintings were derived from photographs, others from Hume’s imagination. Each print has a subtitle related to the original painting. This is the fourth image and its subtitle is Yellow Hair. It is a three-colour image dominated by a large area of yellow which frames a smaller black area, representing the subject’s face, and an even smaller brown area, depicting the neck. It is based on a larger painting of the same title (1995, private collection, London) in gloss paint on wood. The painting has textured lines differentiating the yellow hair from the yellow background and delineating its contours and the features of the subject’s black face. Devoid of these textured lines, the print is more abstracted than the painting, verging on not being recognisable as a portrait. Hume has described the image Yellow Hair as having been inspired by a girl at a disco: ‘When you’re out dancing and a pretty girl comes up and dances and goes away again it’s like this, it leaves an impression on the retina’ (quoted in Contemporary British Art in Print, p.320).
Screenprinting is a medium ideally suited to Hume’s imagery since it involves layering areas of flat colour. His paintings of the early to mid 1990s are characterised by the use of simple blocks of vivid colour and elegant line reminiscent of the late prints of French artist Henri Matisse (1869-1954). During this period Hume painted such iconic subjects as the Christian Madonna 1993 (private collection, London), as well as such everyday objects as flowers, birds, children’s toys and feet or hands. He also made portraits of artists and celebrities, from which he derived the images used in this portfolio of prints. Portraits provides a refined version of Hume’s painterly exploration of the difference between the surface and what lies underneath, what goes into the making of the image, or the mask, of a public icon and how a generic figure is depicted. Pushing Hume’s images still further towards abstraction, this portfolio contributes to the investigation into the signs or language of visual representation central to contemporary figurative painting.
Further reading:
Patrick Elliott, Jeremy Lewison, Contemporary British Art in Print: The Publications of Charles Booth-Clibborn and his Imprint The Paragon Press 1995-2000, London 2001, pp.10, 19, 146-57 and 320, reproduced (colour) p.146
Gary Hume, exhibition catalogue, British Pavilion, XLVIII Venice Biennale, British Council 1999, p.50
Gary Hume, exhibition catalogue, Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht 1996, pp.16-17
Elizabeth Manchester
May 2002
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