Hammond Eggs

Andy Warhol had soup for lunch every day for 20 years. His favourite home-cooked dinner was turkey and potatoes, "because it looked so simple and clean". Picasso liked ancient eggs, stilton and preserved ginger. Edward Hopper was partial to "cans of the friendly bean". Jeff Koons served his favourite food, tuna burgers, at his 50th birthday party. And while Louise Bourgeois had a lifelong fondness for the humble oxtail, at one point in the 1990s Tracey Emin was on 70-100 oysters a week.

What these artists' snack preferences have in common (with the possible exception of Louise Bourgeois's, as oxtail takes a bit of stewing; but then again she was extremely well-organised) is a lack of fuss and no need for lengthy preparation. As Jo Hopper, Edward's wife, told the compiler of a Greenwich Village cookbook who'd approached them for a recipe: "We feel that where there's too much fussy cooking there isn't so much painting."

In a similar vein, here are two tasty no-fuss snacks enjoyed by Lyttelton's favourite son, the artist Bill Hammond, and Jane McBride. I do like to think of Buller's Table Cloth being painted with the help of a fortifying beetroot buttie.

From Harbour Kitchens: Celebrating Lyttelton, Its Food and Its People, Lyttelton Main and Lyttelton West Schools, 2009. Introduction by Roy Montgomery.

Early Sunday Morning

The after-lives of famous artists, in Clarence Street, Riccarton, Christchurch.

In rooms

When the old guy down the road moved out, the wreckers were there within days. The rooms he'd lived in for 45 years were reduced to matchwood within a matter of hours. In the morning the house -- nothing fancy, a rendered 1930s bungalow -- was still standing: by afternoon knock-off it was a pile of splintered plasterboard and broken timber in the middle of the section. The demolition crew left their bulldozer parked snugly beside the heap, its arms raised in victory like Liberty leading the people over the barricades. The next day, along with a portaloo delivery, a couple of heavy duty trucks arrived and took away the rubbish. The house was gone.

There was something indescribably sad about all this. The house was nothing much, and though I fear a neo-Tuscan mansion with triple garaging will rise in its place (the developer's threat to build 'stylish homes' emblazoned on the gate placard fills me with dread), I won't really miss it. I was watching as the power shovel smashed down the exterior wall facing the street and exposed the rooms inside. I'd never been inside the house, but as the machine raised its arms to deliver the deathblow suddenly I was looking at the faded wallpaper and swirling bathroom vinyls the old guy had lived with every day for all those years, his private rooms exposed to merciless public view. I felt terribly prurient for looking. It felt a bit like watching a car crash, at once compelling and abhorrent. The privacy of the house -- the thing that made it a home, rather than just a building -- had been torn apart. What for years had been hidden from public view had become a violent spectacle, then a pile of rubble, then empty ground.

Immediately afterwards it was as if the house -- and the man who had occupied it for nearly five decades, who'd seen several generations come and go and grow up around him on the street -- had never existed at all. The people who move into the new house won't know that a huge dark red camellia once grew in the front garden, nor that the path to the front door curved through the lawn like a serpent, nor that an old man with one leg used to wait near the gate on warm afternoons in his electric wheelchair and raise his hand in greeting to neighbours. It's the way of things, I guess: perhaps particularly in a new-ish country like New Zealand, and perhaps most particularly in Christchurch, which seems to be continually razing itself to the ground and starting again. The old gives way to the new, and history disappears in a heap of rubble on the back of a truck. I'm writing this down so I don't forget.


(In the sort of strange sychronicity of content and affect that the internet increasingly seems to deliver, I came across this blog post the other day devoted to the architectural ghosts of old rooms. It did the job for me. I couldn't bear to take a photo of the old guy's house coming down, though at top above I've pictured one of the trucks which took it away.)

We went to see the Ronnie van Hout show at the Christchurch Art Gallery in the weekend, and I was thinking a lot about rooms while I was there. So many of Ronnie's works seem to be concerned with the memory of specific rooms, and of the psychological effects of enclosed familar spaces. There's something very strange and haunting about his room-based works, a sense of an actual inner world made visible, of the past reconstructed in the present. His father's shed, which Ronnie reportedly saw inside for the first time only after his father's death, has been the subject of a couple of major works -- the twin sheds installed on the roof terrace at Te Papa, as well as a temporary installation on the forecourt outside the Christchurch Art Gallery a couple of years ago.

Ronnie van Hout, A loss, again, 2008, at Te Papa. Image via Darren Knight Gallery.

The current survey show -- quite brilliantly put together, alternately tense and hilarious -- includes the wooden models of his old school and family house, with a tiny video screen of the artist flickering in the windows. There's a fantastically eerie new work inspired by his trip to Antarctica, in which a life-sized dummy of the artist dressed in parka and snow goggles sits alone inside a kind of white viewing chamber, a thin rivulet of blood running from his nose. Peering through a window at him, I felt as if my breathing were instantly being measured and constricted. Even the tiny banana-man model seems trapped inside his airless perspex display case, holding a minute 'help me' placard.

Somewhere about the middle of the show, a wall appears to be entirely empty: it's only on close inspection that a small peephole becomes visible. Through the peephole is a secret room, with two genderless figures, slightly desiccated, on what looks like a doctor's couch, one naked. Un-signposted and easily capable of being missed by visitors, the secret room is entirely closed in by vast temporary walls which reach to the ceiling. It comes as a complete surprise, and somehow, within the architecture of the space, seems impossible. But it's there.

The changing spaces of art galleries always interest me. I like going into a familar gallery space and being bamboozled by a new installation, finding the gallery's architecture altered beyond recognition by the repositioning of temporary walls, so that my memory of other visits to earlier shows is entirely disrupted. The reconfiguration of architecture for the display of art seems entirely as it should be.

Equally, it's interesting to think about the accumulated histories of other artworks that have hung or been installed on the same walls before. Visiting City Gallery Wellington, I've looked at works displayed in the big downstairs gallery and thought about where the paintings by Van Gogh and Cezanne were hung when the Stedelijk show came to town; at Waikato Museum, I've wondered if the ghost of Simon Morris's big monochrome wall painting ever floats up though the dozens of layers of gallery white acrylic which now sandwich it to the wallboard; at Peter McLeavey's, I've looked at the hundreds of filled nail-holes on the scarred walls and wondered which were the ones that held McCahon's 'Scared' paintings in the mid-1970s; at the old Robert McDougall Art Gallery, where it was easier to install a temporary wall complete with faux wooden dado in front of Petrus van der Velden's Dutch Funeral than it was to take the massive work down, I've enjoyed secretly knowing that the big gloomy painting was still glowering away behind the wall a couple of feet away.

I've realised that some of my favourite works deal with the ghosts of old rooms: I suspect it's a hangover from having moved around so much as a small child.

Here's Rachel Whiteread's Ghost (1990), a concrete cast of an entire room displayed at the Tate.

Edward Hopper's Western Motel, 1957, from the collection of Yale University Art Gallery (Bequest of Stephen Carlton Clark, via ArtTatler.com. )


And an evocation of a lost room by the Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy, who spent a lot of time alone in rooms remembering more congenial times in other rooms:

The Afternoon Sun

This room, how well I know it.
Now they’re renting it, and the one next to it,
as offices. The whole house has become
an office building for agents, merchants, companies.

This room, how familiar it is.

Here, near the door, was the couch,
a Turkish carpet in front of it.
Close by, the shelf with two yellow vases.
On the right—-no, opposite—-a wardrobe with a mirror.
In the middle the table where he wrote,
and the three big wicker chairs.
Beside the window was the bed
where we made love so many times.

They must still be around somewhere, those old things.

Beside the window was the bed;
the afternoon sun fell across half of it.

...One afternoon at four o’clock we separated
for a week only... And then—
that week became forever.

(From C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992. Via Cavafy.com)

Slow local

Edward Hopper, Highland Light, 1930, watercolour over graphite on rough white wove paper, Collection of Harvard College


I've written before about the way in which certain artists come to "own" the views which inspire their work, to a point where it's almost impossible to see a particular landscape except through their eyes. Think of Edward Hopper's Cape Cod landscapes; Ed Ruscha's LA; Arthur Boyd's Wimmera. There are dozens of New Zealand examples: Toss Woollaston's high vantage point across Wellington Harbour, which he experienced in a sort of muddy atmospheric cubist frenzy, and accordingly now so do I; McCahon's tablet-like clifs at Muriwai; the slight edge of craziness in the swirling skies of Bill Sutton's rural Canterbury churchyards; the surprising delicacy of Bill Hammond's Boulder Bay in Lyttelton Harbour, with its whispy birds and plumes of spray; the doughty resoluteness of Michael Smither's stony Taranaki beaches banking up his glimpse of the mountain.

Years ago I was driving through Provence when I saw a familiar landscape appear like a mirage in the distance. "It's Mont Sainte-Victoire!" I said excitedly. "You know, that mountain Cezanne painted a lot." Until I saw it I'd had no idea where it was, or even, stupidly, that it was a real place: I'd never thought about it. I felt ridiculously pleased: seeing the view framed in the windscreen was like owning my own personal version of the paintings, until the road turned a corner and it was out of sight.

The extraordinary thing was that what I saw from the car looked just like the paintings, an arrangement of angles and planes and edges softened by a golden haze. I wasn't long out of university and had "done" Post-Impressionism twice, once as part of a stage one French culture course and again as part of Art History (bet it doesn't feature much in either today). Of course everything was taught by slides: there were no real works of art to look at. Driving through the French countryside I realised that my understanding was completely at fault, and that Cezanne, at least, was much more of a realist than I'd hitherto assumed. (Ditto Hammond, when I took a walk down to Boulder Bay.)

On a visit to Christchurch once, I had a similar experience of encountering a landscape I was already familar with from a painting. I was driving through the old streets of the eastern central suburbs, trying to find an acquaintance's studio, hopelessly lost. Going through an intersection, I looked to the right towards the hills, and suddenly saw Doris Lusk's Pumping Station. It looked exactly like the painting. Just as suddenly, it was gone, and I've never seen it again.

Doris Lusk, The Pumping Station, 1958, oil on board, Collection of Auckland Art Gallery

Built in 1882, the Christchurch Pumping Station (it pumps the city's sewage along the pipes out to Bromley) is now a protected building. The city council with the poorest record in the country of granting non-notifiable resource consents (effectively letting developers knock stately old buildings down before anyone else finds out about it) couldn't knock it down, even if it wanted to: Lusk's view is safe. (Now, if only I could find it again!)

But not so Edward Hopper's view of Highland Light and the keeper's house at Truro, Cape Cod, which inspired so many of his works. The NY Times has a piece about the zoning consent which has just been granted to owners of the section next door to the house once owned (and designed) by Hopper and his wife Josephine, to allow them to build a 6,500-square-foot trophy house, which will effectively block the barren view made into one of the iconic images of American art by Hopper. It's being done in the teeth of opposition from local residents, who say there are two types of people that traditionally live in Truro: fishing people and artists, and landmarks are important to both.

It's a vain hope, I guess, to suggest that landscapes which artists have made famous should be protected from development. But in this instance, it does seem a bit of a pity.


Hopper used to drive around the Cape a lot to find locations to paint; he often painted from his car, a two-tone Buick sedan, in which he had had the green-tinted windshield and windows replaced with clear glass. An article in Time magazine in December 1956 in which he was interviewed at his Truro home commented that his paintings look as if the viewer is travelling, somehow:

"By suppressing all details that would not be noticed in a passing glance, and arranging his compositions to suggest that the scene extends far beyond the frame, he puts his picture window in motion. Seeing a Hopper exhibition is like floating through people's backyards on a slow local, in a state of awed awareness."

Unlike the new neighbours, one of the current owners of a house painted by Hopper says she feels an obligation to keep the house as it was, given the numbers of people who come to photograph and paint it themselves, following Hopper's trail around Truro. You can compare the paintings with the locations as they are today in this New York Times feature: or click here for an interactive 360 degree video view from the Hopper house. Might not look like this for much longer.