frame 39 July 2023
Hugo Hamper-Potts
An interview
Hugo Hamper-Potts at the Marlborough Gallery, Face to Face: A Celebration of Portraiture
Primarily self-taught, British artist Hugo Hamper-Potts was inspired by his father to paint, and has since featured in exhibitions at Cob Gallery, Studio 3 and elsewhere. In both his landscapes and his portraiture, his work is ebullient and familiar, playful and earthy, capturing the kinesis, the stillness, and the essence of life itself.
CHEERIO had the pleasure of sitting down with Hugo and asking him some questions about his practice.
Roots by Hugo Hamper-Potts
CHEERIO: Who are your main influences?
Hugo Hamper-Potts: My influences range far and wide. From the get-go, I have always been enamoured by Rembrandt, Velasquez, Freud and Bacon, and a little bit of Sickert. I like how they achieve such emotional intensity in their work in such simple ways; a powerful brush stroke for the finger, or a shadow hiding the eye. That I don’t know their subjects but feel very emotionally attached to them is something I aim to achieve in my portraits.
My landscape work is rooted in the English landscape painting tradition; John Constable sketches, the Bomberg school, and especially Leon Kossoff. I take great influence in the painter Michael Andrews, so much so that I have painted numerous paintings of Glen Artney, where he spent a great deal of time and produced some of his best work, and where he is buried amongst the rolling hills.
Are you trying to represent or say something with your art? Is it a reflection and representation of you, or the representation of an idea, a notion about the world?
HH-P: I like that nature is constantly moving and never still, that humans are always getting older day by day, and that everything is in a constant state of change. I try to express this movement of time in my paintings, to give them a timeless quality.
Gorge by Hugo Hamper-Potts
HH-P: I want my landscape work to transgress time, to feel pre-historic as well as being there today and tomorrow. In my portrait work, I like the figures to anchor their environment, to try and make that precise moment in time permanent before it falls apart and changes into something else.
How do you hope viewers will react to / experience your work?
HH-P: I hope to evoke the experience of life in all its beauty, ugliness, ups and downs, and to hold you there in meditative peace for a few minutes before you move on.
With regard to the modern subjects and settings of your paintings, considering the more traditional history of figurative painting, what steered you towards this art form?
HH-P: I have always liked people, places and painting, so combining them in the time I’m living will always give the traditional medium a contemporary twist.
