In his first ever interview, the artist talks about a life spent making dazzling pictures, why he’s not bitter about being undiscovered, and why his art school ‘didn’t get’ Matisse
’s home in Bath. There are artworks everywhere – not just hanging on the walls, but stacked against wardrobes, resting on tables and, somewhat unnervingly, lying on the floor around the doorway. There are paintings in acrylic, watercolour and oil – dazzling abstract swirls and French landscapes in deep greens and purples – as well as ceramics, playful sculptures, painted trays … even an old gate that’s been repurposed as a skinny figure holding a camera. It’s a lot to take in.
Hampton was never one for self-promotion – this is his first ever interview, in fact – but he did have the advantage of coming from artistic stock. His grandfather was the famous sculptorand his father was a painter and restorer too. “Also a drinker,” says Hampton, who describes a pretty tough upbringing in London. “We lived in very primitive conditions. Two rooms for six of us in the upstairs of a shack. An outside lavatory and no hot water.
Chatting to Hampton you realise just what an enormous amount of art history and change he’s lived through. “When I was a student at Kingston they knew nothing about colour,” he says, reaching into a pile of books and pulling out a copy of. “They hadn’t read any of the recent books by the American painters.” I’m gobsmacked by how he knows where everything is in this gloriously cluttered artistic house, how he can quickly turn to the right page in an academic textbook to illustrate his point.
These days, Hampton prefers to work in pastels, probably because they’re a bit easier, he says. I ask how he avoids repeating himself – or getting jaded. “Variations,” he says, and leans over to the kitchen table on which lies a stack of maybe two dozen squares of kitchen roll, each one containing nine small ink drawings around a theme. They’re minimal, intricate, rather beautiful with the ink leaking into the absorbent material.
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