Gary Hume
Gary Hume
Gary Stewart Hume is an English artist. Hume's work is strongly identified with the YBA artists who came to prominence in the early 1990s. Hume currently lives and works in London and Accord, New York...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionArtist
Date of Birth9 May 1962
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I want to paint something that's gorgeous, something that's perfect. So that it's full of sadness.
I think Picasso is more feminine than Matisse.
annual brief full growing love wood
I love to see a wood full of bluebells. Growing up in the Kent countryside, I have special memories of this brief annual spectacle.
informing painting says
I have to go with what the painting says to me. The painting is always informing me. I'm its servant; it's not mine. I'm doing what it wants.
human work
I don't make political work. I don't make work that criticises the state. I make as human work as I can.
I do think you get lonelier and lonelier being an artist as you get older.
tenderness
A painting should be tough; it should have muscle, but I have to find some tenderness in it, too. There has to be that dynamic.
agents bit concrete drawn feeling magazines news particular poetry rack realise wondering
If I'm feeling desperate, I'll go out image-hunting. I'll go to news agents and stand at the rack flicking through magazines or go to second-hand bookshops. And then, bit by bit, like concrete poetry, I start to realise that I am drawn to particular things, and then I start wondering why that is.
companion demands drawing either might work
One drawing demands to become a painting, so I start to work on that, and then the painting might demand something else. Then the painting might say, 'I want a companion, and the companion should be like this,' so I have to find that, either by drawing it myself or locating the image.
anyone approach bothered constantly describe forget history looks people point taken
People constantly describe me as a formalist or even a minimalist, but I'm not really bothered with the rules of painting or the history of painting. My approach is that everything is mine. I take what I can use from wherever, and then I forget where I've taken it from. But there is no point me making anything that looks like anyone else's.
duration last outset reasonably
Sometimes I can see the whole painting from the outset in my mind's eye. But more often than not, that idea doesn't last the duration of the painting. Sometimes it comes out easy, just as I had envisaged. But that is reasonably rare.
fascinated time until work
I'm more and more fascinated in my own work. I work from 10 A.M. until about 9 P.M., but it's not an obsession, it's a pleasure. There's never enough time.
doors perfect relief
The Doors are perfect paintings; a relief from the picture world I’ve created for myself.
huge museums narrative paintings
Small paintings can be fantastic. But you can't often get a narrative out of a small painting. In any case, museums are huge places, and you want to take up some space.