The Week
19th September 2008

The Times
September 6, 2008

The Independent
18 September 2008

Observer and Guardian Newspapers
Nov 2005

The Independent
October 2005

Where to Buy
Tom Hammick
at the Eagle Gallery

This new exhibition of the painter and sought after printmaker Tom Hammick is dominated by the superb NOCTURNAL - in which paintings are seen through studio windows from a garden at night. A row of winter trees is set against a greenish twilight with a night sky behind ; the paintings are brilliant in the darkness, suggesting real scenes remembered rather than actual canvases, and there's the poignant sense of an outsider looking in at life and warmth which was hinted at in Hammick's earlier, smaller images of lighted trains on nocturnal journeys.

These paintings seem an enigmatic celebration of domesticity, with the garden as setting and metaphor - children earnestly digging; a solitary figure comtemplating the bleakness of three empty seed-beds; companionship and distance. Hammick's colours have become darker, richer and more sonorous, and that seems to go for the content of this new work too. Prices £950 - £17,000 + VAT 159, Farringdon Road, London EC1 (0207 833 2674). Until 4th October.