Adrian Hemming British, b. 1945

In our latest venture, The Order of Time, a suite of 6 prints, we have exploited the values inherent in photopolymer etching. This unique process can deploy the richest and most subtle range of tones. Combine this with the scale of Adrian's prints, and you have a feast on your hands. For this body of work, Adrian painted on a plastic support film similar to true grain, with Indian Inks, both water-based and non-water-based, to create heavily worked images with an astonishing variety of tonal and surface qualities.

What you don't expect as you process these gigantic plates is the transformation embodied in this particular technique. His original work always looked good, but the print becomes a super-enhanced version. Just as William Eggleston's use of the dye transfer process tips the mundane subject matter over the edge into a semi-hallucinatory experience, Adrian's photopolymer etchings are another kind of transmutation. As my eye glides over the landscape of these massive prints, I am reminded of those silent and surreal sequences of film beamed across space from the Apollo spacecraft as it orbited and recorded the first images of the moon's surface. In Adrian's work, we enter the architecture of the inner world. In a culture dominated by imagery blunted by the binary mathematics of the pixel, Adrian offers an entry into the lost kingdoms of the imagination.

Ian Brown, Volcanic Editions , Brighton , June 2019

 

The Order of Time Series (2019) is a set of 6 large format solar etchings with an edition of 10 for each image.  Printed in collaboration with Volcanic Editions.

Adrian came to my workshop as a painter. His language was that of strong gesture, vivid colour and an accomplished understanding of surface. To make the step from paint into print, we chose carborundum etching. This process enables the brush mark, when delivering resin with controlled viscosity, to offer a range of autographic marks from liquid to stiff whilst loaded with carborundum. Carborundum granules trap pigment allowing the artist to print pure and rich colour, unaffected by the chemistry of the metal plate. I can't say Adrian fell in love with this process (as his friend Hughie O'Donoghue remarked, this is a young man's game) inking and wiping large plates is long and physically arduous. But it made some interesting prints.

 

Next, we dropped the resin and carborundum in favour of large shellacked boards and, working again with a range of products, PVA, heavy structure gel, and heavy carvable modelling paste; we created the plates for The Shipping Forecast. These were made on substantial plates bigger than the largest paper I can get through my press (93 x 62 cms). Printing these ten editions was a steep learning curve. Adrian swiftly understood that making the matrix was just the beginning. His inking up, and more significantly his wiping technique, allowed him to explore the possibilities offered by these plates but also to create another layer of thought on the surface of each print.

Ian Brown, Volcanic Editions , Brighton , June 2019

 

The Shipping Forecast is a series of 10 large format intaglio prints, each 63 x 91 cm, printed on Arches paper using Lawrence's Ultra Black ink. There is an edition of 10 per image. Due to edge-to-edge printing, all are signed, dated, and numbered on the reverse. Although struck from the same plate, each print differs slightly due to the processes involved.

 

The Shipping Forecast is also a BBC Radio broadcast of weather reports and forecasts for the seas around the coasts of the British Isles. It is produced by the Met Office and transmitted by BBC Radio Four on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency. The forecasts sent over the Navtex system use a similar format and the same sea areas. The waters around the British Isles are divided into 31 sea areas, also known as weather areas. There are four broadcasts per day at the UK local times.

Broadcasting Bands:
Longwave (LW)
Frequency Modulation (FM)

 

00:48 - transmitted on FM and LW, it includes weather reports from an extended list of coastal stations at 00:52 and an inshore waters forecast at 00:55. It concludes with a brief UK weather outlook for the coming day. The broadcast finishes at approximately 00:58.

Painting is necessarily a solitary occupation. Everything that matters most about it takes place silently in the painter's brain. In the studio, when the hard work is being done, the silence is absolute.

And yet every painter needs to talk - needs help, needs criticism, needs a frank and knowing friendship. So, when I began to try to paint seriously after I had suffered a stroke, Adrian Hemming's friendship was both wonderful luck and a lifeline. He comes into the studio, raises a quizzical eyebrow, perhaps shakes his head about something that had pleased me, and quietly, gently suggests other directions I might follow. And he's always right.

 

Adrian and I started talking because we live close to one another, have numerous mutual friends, and do not fanatically abjure Pale Ale. But the basis of our friendship and relationship is painting, painting, and painting.

 

I always call Adrian, with a slight note of jealousy in my voice, "a proper painter". Unlike me, he has gone through a full and rigorous training. He has devoted his entire life to mastering pigment and surface, design and meaning since his teenage years. And, by God, it shows. Working in his Islington studio, he is meticulously picky about the colours he uses and mostly grinds for himself. (The Unison Company of Northumberland's A19 Ultramarine is a particular favourite.) The walls around him are hung with the latest work, which is always and forever a work in progress: Adrian is a great believer in the virtues of pitiless obliteration. Anything that may seem easy about his painting has been very hard won. In fact, one of the first lessons he taught me was that even what one might consider to be a fine passage of painting - square inches one is quietly delighted with - must often be overpainted or rubbed out in the higher interests of a completed work.

 

This way of painting produces a surface that must be looked at near at hand. What I particularly value in Adrian's art is the rich, rucked textures and the densely worked, scored, and often extremely complex surface areas he achieves. Let me explain why I think this matters so much. We live in a world dominated by flat, glossy, glassy screens. Today's digital manipulation is boundless and endless. And, just as with the original invention of chemical photography in the 19th century, this technical revolution throws problems to today's painters.

 

How does handmade, traditional art respond? Should we become video artists? Should we give up pencils for apps on the iPad? Both of us believe that the flatness of the digital world must send painting in the opposite direction, back to the claggy materiality, the "thisness" of oil and pigment. To be radical today is to insist on the organic essence and origins of the tradition, and I would argue that you can read this very clearly in the texture of a Hemming. This means that you need to look at these pictures in this show: reproductions, however good, are not nearly enough. But - and this is not a skill I have yet achieved - Adrian's densely worked passages occur only in harmony with larger areas of calm. The frenzy is more frenzied when surrounded by lapping, quiet blues or greens.

 

Although we mainly discuss the craft and physicality of painting - about pigments, bristles, different oils, and glazes - Adrian Hemming is a philosophical painter, much concerned with myth, the environment, and the nature of perception. Above all, he is trying to answer the most challenging and vital question a painter faces, which is simply: "What should fresh painting look like?"

 

All of us who paint, paint with the huge weight of the Western tradition sitting on our shoulders. At times it can seem as if every idea has been had before. Perhaps every design, motif, and colour combination has been done better already; perhaps all that is left, even for a serious and honest painter, is a quotation. Adrian, like me, is a fascinated and obsessive looker, a haunter of exhibitions by greats. When we flop down in our nearest pub - the Lansdowne in Gloucester Avenue - we are often talking about the latest Rauschenberg show, or Howard Hodgkin or Peter Lanyon or Patrick Heron. Adrian was taught by, among others, the painter I would regard as the most successful non-representational living British artist, Gillian Ayres. Yet he has managed that great feat: a Hemming, whatever its size, shape and colour range, looks like a Hemming and nothing else. He has absorbed, ingested and then quietly gone his own way.

I admire him so much for that. Since my stroke, I have had a much more intense sense of the importance of going your own way. Not a day passes when I don't think about how little time is left, and for me, this means a redoubled effort to paint better because it is the best way of expressing my personal sense of what it means to be alive. Although this might seem a somewhat solemn undertaking, and it is certainly a strenuous one, it is, in fact, full of joyousness. When I am painting badly, I drive myself into a rage. But when I am painting well, I feel full of delight. A big part of that delight has come about thanks to the calm, wise friendship and peaceable advice given to me by Adrian Hemming. A lesser man would have tried to encourage me to paint just like him: Adrian has helped me to paint like me, only better - a much harder task. As you observe these pictures, I hope you see the story of an artistic friendship, too.

Andrew Marr, London 2017