Hambleton is also making mirror pieces in the studio. The way he recharges by moving between the studio and the street is another of his dualisms. “I’ll do something in the street. Then I’ll do something in the studio,” he says. “And there’ll be a relationship between the two. It won’t be the exact same thing.” So, it was when he made “Image Mass Murder” soon after his arrival in San Francisco. “I had friends that laid down and I traced around them,” he says. Then he would splash red paint, indicating blood. “It seemed like I was a crazy guy in the street. But that was totally orchestrated and organized. I had a studio. An exhausting process!” he says. “It took three days to paint San Francisco red and it made the front page of the San Francisco Examiner.” The paper ran a photograph with the caption: “No one died here. This is the work of a sick jokester.” “So, the media was part of the work. That was an achievement.” He took “Mass Murder” on a crypto-tour of 15 cities in the US and Canada, then put up a show in 1978 which revealed that the whole thing was an artwork and the artist/jokester was himself. Hambleton had been living on New York’s Lower East Side when he launched the “Shadowman” series. This was a breakthrough. “With Mass Murder something had happened. Someone was murdered on the sidewalk,” he says. “But with the Shadow work, you walked around the corner and you saw somebody in a doorway. There was somebody there. It was very direct. Like Richard Serra, in a way. It was very in your face and very immediate.” There had been a sense in the New York art world that there was an otherness about Hambleton, that he wasn’t playing by the ordinary rules. “Jean-Michel and Keith were always cool. The first time I met Keith he was sweeping the floor of Tony Shafrazi’s gallery. He knew exactly where to be,” says Walter Robinson, then a painter, now the editor of ArtNet Magazine. Hambleton, being Pollock-difficult, if in a more cerebral way, had made no attempt to align himself with cool. But “Shadowman” propelled him to the fore. “Those nightmarish creatures were very effective,” Robinson says. “And true to life.” How did Hambleton feel about other people putting up their own tags over the Shadowmen? “That’s nice! I appreciate the input and the interaction. I don’t want them to look like art. The issue in the 70s was if it looked like art, it wasn’t. Carl Andre didn’t look like art. So, if I put a shadow up there would be all these other tags around it or on it. It used my work. But someone who is going to go out and vandalize every one of them I have a problem with.” In 1984 Hambleton went to Europe three times. “I wanted to do something special for 1984. So, I went to about 24 cities. Every major city in Western Europe.” Warhol was taken by Hambleton. “Andy kept begging me to come up. He said, ‘Richard, I want to do your portrait.’ I never did” he paused and added “I don’t want any more opportunities lost.” The nightmares were real. He was leafing through sheets of drawings from his Marlboro Man/Rodeo series when I asked if there was any rodeo life in Canada? “Nothing! Nothing like that at all!” he said. “The cowboy was such an American hero. The white hat! I should have made him into a shadow. Evil!” Evil. The word confronted me with another Richard Hambleton dualism, not street/studio, nor Conceptual/painterly, but deadlier, the way he contrives to make his high-energy art while in the jaws of a horrendous addiction. This of itself would not give his career its folkloric resonance, though, because junkie artists, writers, musicians are ten thousand a penny and tend to burn out quickly. It’s the way that Hambleton consistently produces, continuing to work through thick and thin, and the way that – less explicitly than William Burroughs but with similar resilience – he has found ways to turn these terrible drives into art. Marcia Resnick, herself formerly a heavy user, and a friend of Hambleton, sets a vivid scene. “His life was so inundated in blood. Shooting up all the time. He was a messy junkie. There was no hiding it with him,” she says. She remembers being in a rehab and watching him enter. “I saw him walking in with a suitcase that was painted with gold leaf,” she says. “And two minutes later I saw him running. The suitcase was filled with little packages of heroin. And they wouldn’t find it. Right? In a rehab.” All of which would just be black comedy except for the work that Hambleton was then making. These were the pieces I saw in Chrystie Street: Small square canvases on woodblocks, gold leafed, and overlaid with delicate abstract patterns in dark red. I learned later that Hambleton had painted
The silhouettes being the Shadowmen. “Now I’m doing Standing Shadows. Indoors. I like the way they work indoors. I’m happy doing one after another after another. Each one is an individual. Each one is different.” Well, they weren’t all standing. I indicated a canvas bouncing with splattery energy. What was that? “That’s going to be a Jumping Shadow. Maybe it’s going to be a Painter Painting. But I’m trying not to be too graphic and to say too much.” The “Beautiful Paintings” are just that, beautiful. Which is extraordinary in itself because beauty is normally a by-product of the art-making process and artists who actually set out to make beautiful work usually create either decoration or kitsch. But Hambleton’s works are thrillingly beautiful. It can hardly be irrelevant that he began making these after the “Wave” paintings, so it seems clear to me that it’s a felt conflict between the ugliness of his circumstances and what he is putting on canvas that makes them the radiant things they are. “There was a part of it that was a personal evolution of my way of being,” Hambleton says. “And part of it was conceptual. The recipe is very simple in the subline. You get beyond beauty. You noticed that piece of stainless- steel downstairs? That mirrored stainless steel? The Beautiful Paintings are partly beautiful because of the materials I used. Like gold leaf.” And just what is the relationship between the Beautiful Paintings and the gold squares worked with his blood that I saw way back on Chrystie Street? There was a long pause.
Richard Hambleton doesn’t give any interviews. Up to now he has preferred to remain a phantom: not unlike the ubiquitous shadow figures he has painted on walls, doorways and at vacant lots in every neighbourhood from Tribeca to the Upper East Side. Hambleton lives and paints in a windowless sub-basement SoHo crypt, where water flutes steadily through sewer pipes and a dank mist fills the air. Since January of last year, this underground man has been stealing out into the night, turning the city into his canvas with a can of black paint, amusing some passersby, making others just a little nervous. “The figures are called Nightlife,’” says the wire-haired Hambleton in a gentle, dampened voice, “because in the dark they come alive. They create the illusion of people standing against buildings. The day reveals them as paintings.” The expression of each shadow character is tailored to fit the location. On a large concrete wall, the figures may jump or dance. In dark doorways, they may lurk in or guard dangerous corners. Because his work “fits into” the city, Hambleton feels that it differs from other familiar street icons like Keith Haring’s primitives or the avant group’s squiggly, multicoloured rectangles. “Other artists put their work on the city,” he says, “but what I paint on the walls is only part of the picture. The city psychologically completes the rest. People experience my paintings. They aren’t simply exposed to them.” Hambleton first splashed the streets in his native San Francisco in 1976 with a piece called “Image Mass Murder.” He traced the outline of his friends’ bodies on the pavement, then splashed the images with blood- red paint. He “terrorized” 15American and Canadian cities with the piece, generating a good deal of edgy attention…Two years later, he plastered 750 life-size photo images of himself dressed in a conservative suit across the walls of 33 cities. The psychotic/romantic piece – which had three titles, “I only have Eyes for You,” “Putting Yourself Up for Abuse,” and “Spreading Yourself Thin” was done on blueprint paper designed to fade after three months. Today the only remnants are white ghosts of an evaporated image. The San Francisco Examiner ran a front-page photo with a caption that read: “No one died here. This is the work of a sick jokester.” Finally, in 1978 he held an exhibition revealing himself as the “murderer.” ”, ”, l f ”,
– Anthony Hayden-Guest
ARTIST OF SHADOWS SHEDS ‘LIGHT’ ON NIGHTLIFE. Daily News Feature, 1983.
them with his own blood. “I used to think I’m a Conceptual painter, you know. I felt like I could paint anything,” he says. “When I did the Wave paintings, I had never painted a wave, an oceanscape before. I never studied landscape paintings. But I had this concept. I knew how to create Wave paintings. I romanticized it and did a 24-foot wave painting. And when I did that painting, I thought that’s it! I’ve done a great Wave painting. This is the way I was thinking at the time. This is great. So, what shall I do next?” What he did, not next, but soon enough, was lose his loft on Chrystie. His life went into freefall. “My self-esteem went down so low,” he said. His huge collection of works by Haring and Basquiat – all trades for his own pieces – had been liquidated when he failed to make payments to a storage unit. “I ended up being homeless. Just like that,” he said. “I kept finding a space and I was evicted. I’ve been evicted from like six places. That totally messed me up. Even though I survived on the street in the 90s. There are all these people on the streets of New York surviving. I got pretty good at it. “It was totally frustrating. I kept wanting to get some security. A studio space. That’s what I wanted to do. But, being homeless and stuff, I started existing by giving head.” Hello, Richard? What? “Painting Shadow heads! It was kind of funny The idea of focusing on a subject matter and doing it over and over and over again with something relatively new for me. But doing a hundred Shadow heads became fascinating, doing the same thing over and over and over again. The idea! And a lot of times they don’t work.” He gestured at a “Shadow.” “I’ve maybe painted this canvas ten times. Over and over again.” It seemed the moment to bring up a notion of mine. Perhaps the most famously tormented artists actually need their torments, might perhaps even bring them on their own heads? I asked Hambleton whether the intensity of his work might owe something to the intense circumstances – what Hambleton haltingly calls his “situation” – under which he had to make it. He slapped the idea down. “No! Not at all!” he said. “No! It’s been subsistence painting. It’s the opposite. When I get what I need the work is much better.” It was now Hambleton who proposed the notion of an inherent dualism. “I’m basically two people now. I’m doing these surface silhouettes and I’m doing Beautiful Paintings.” as ”.
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