Bill Hammond ‘The Quik and the Ded’

The Quik and the Ded is a visually complex and yet surprisingly balanced painting that showcases all of Bill Hammond’s idiosyncratic brilliance. The work dates from 1993, and is painted in the illustrative, cartoonish style that characterised Hammond’s work from the 1980s and early ‘90s. One could read this way of working as a response to Japanese manga, or comic books more generally. Or, perhaps, the cartoonish modernism of American painter Philip Guston.

However one chooses to read it, The Quik and the Ded is visually entrancing. Some of the details and arrangements of form are almost hieroglyphic; in the densely layered tableau of figures, symbols, quasi[1]numeric tablets and speech bubbles, something seems to be written – albeit in an indecipherable script. The main figure in the top left panel smiles while dancing on a tidal wave. Hybrid tree-buildings propagate amongst mountains and small plants. Dark patches could read as lakes or patches of night sky or oil spills. Contorted figures pose and flex. With this combination of elements, the work conveys a sense that is simultaneously cheery and ominous – The Quik and the Ded could be read as portent of doom, or equally as a work of black comedy.

At the time this work was painted, Hammond had already began some of his distinctive humanoid bird works, including the Buller paintings, which share a similar palette. Though he was yet to fully embrace it; The Quik and the Ded bears greater resemblance to his cartoonish work from the 1980s than the majestic bird-laden dreamscapes that followed. Yet, in some of the details of this work, the coming transformation is foreshadowed. The top right panel features a decorated urn – a recurrent motif in his later work. Birds appear on the top right and lower left panels, and some of the numerous figures hold poses similar to those of the avian humanoids that would grace his canvasses from the mid-1990s on.

Writing on Hammond and his work, musician Chris Knox recognised a ‘kindred spirit’. Knox stated, “[…] Bill was way outside the New Zealand art mainstream when I first saw his stuff at the Auckland Red Metro in 1985 or thereabouts. More like the confrontational, eyeball-gouging work I was salivating over in Art Spiegleman and Françoise Mouly’s New York-based Raw comics than whatever was currently fashionable in Kiwi art circles, it thrilled me with its sharply visceral oddness.”1 There can be little debate that Hammond’s work is unusual, particularly in the case of his earlier material, though it is precisely this quirky, offbeat character that makes it so compelling and unique.

A consistent throughline in Hammond’s oeuvre – from the cartoonish to the otherworldly – is his incomparable flair for composition. His paintings consistently contain multitudes, and yet they are always visually balanced. In the hands of a less skilled creator of images, the sheer volume of pictorial elements in The Quik and the Ded would make for a cacophonous mess. Hammond, on the other hand, creates a seething and eerie symphony.

Hammond’s legacy is rich. His paintings have made an indelible mark on New Zealand art, and they will continue to provoke and enthral viewers for decades to come. The Quik and the Ded is a singular painting from a pivotal period. In its complex weave of imagery and symbols, Hammond’s extraordinary artistic vision is in full view.

Julian McKinnon