Summer Group Exhibition 2022 featuring Liam Hanley (1933-2019)

Liam Hanley by Andrew Lambirth

Liam Hanley lives in Kentish Town, but his heart belongs to two square miles of undulating fields near Royston in Hertfordshire, which he paints with unending zest and invention. Born in Kensington in 1933, he is the only child of the radical novelist James Hanley, who ran away to sea at the age of 12 and became a friend of such literary figures as TE Lawrence, EM Forster and Henry Green. John Cowper Powys was young Liam’s godfather, and the family lived for many years in Montgomeryshire. Liam inherited his artistic leanings from his mother, herself a painter, collage-maker and writer. It was she, he insists, who taught him to look. After studying at Wrekin College in Shropshire, Hanley did his National Service in the Royal Marines, in Malta, Libya and Egypt. He then worked as a newspaper and TV journalist for 30 years, but began to grow seriously interested in painting, taking evening classes at the Central School of Art in the late 1950s. In those years he travelled in his spare time and painted whatever caught his eye: he was ‘like a tramp with a bank balance’ (in his own evocative phrase), on the road whenever possible. But Wales remained his main point of reference and many pictures were of the landscape around his old home. His parents sold the Welsh house in 1963, and Liam was bereft. As a painter he felt rootless until he discovered Royston, a stretch of interesting hollows and windswept edges shaped by the Great Surge of the Ice Age.

Hanley took early retirement from ITN to work full-time as a painter. He held his first one-man show back in 1962 at the Royal Society of Arts, and has subsequently exhibited regularly in London, also in Newcastle, Chichester and Kendal. His work, which at one point he wanted to be as accurate a record of the passing seasons as the nature essays of Richard Jefferies, has grown more abstract over the years. On occasion geometrical (like Mondrian or Victor Pasmore), it is still lyrical and Romantic, with its high viewpoints and luminous tones. There is also a certain affinity with those American realist painters of the 1950s such as Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and the fields and big skies of John Rogers Cox.

The early watercolours with their linear Celtic echoes of David Jones (such as Clusters, 1966), developed into the more assured surge and shimmer of the bean-field paintings of the 1980s, culminating in that marvellous celebration of pattern in nature, Misty Landscape, 1987. Later the imagery can be increasingly emblematic, but Hanley never loses sight of the inspiration derived from direct observation, despite the pronounced impulse towards musical structure, as well as a relish for the decorative. His paintings are full of beautiful shapes, not stories. He is a formal painter with a powerful understanding of place. He writes: ‘I look for landscape that has an echo. Places and shapes have always travelled with us, the stuff of dreams. To find the right landscape is to realise the dream.’

Liam Hanley (1933-2019)

Self–taught artist

1962-1988 Scriptwriter, ITN News

One Man Exhibitions

1962 Royal Society of Arts

1964 Cavendish Gallery, London

1965 Opus Gallery, London

1966 Mermaid Theatre, London

1967, 69 Heals – Mansard Art Gallery, London

1968, 81 Stone Gallery, Newcastle

1973 David Paul Gallery, Chichester

1974, 76, 79, 82 Thackeray Gallery, London

1984, 86, 88 Phoenix Gallery, Lavenham

1989, 91 Phoenix Gallery, London

1985 Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal

1987 Beldesign, Cambridge

1991 Broughton House Gallery

1991, 93 Bronwen White, New Orleans

1994 Alresford Gallery, nr Winchester

1994, 99, 02, 05, 07, 10 Beardsmore Gallery, London

2006 Highgate Gallery, London

2014 Crane Kalman Gallery, London

2016 Chappel Galleries, Essex - Liam Hanley: Tracing the Pattern

Mixed Exhibitions

c.1960’s AIA Gallery, London
Tib Lane Gallery, Manchester
Redfern Gallery, London, Summer Shows;
Stroud Festival – Redfern Painters

1964 - 66 St Pancras Festivals, London

1967 - 70 Camden Festivals, London

1967, 69 Camden Collection, London

c.1970’s Piccadilly Gallery, London, Summer Shows

1971 Mermaid Theatre, London

1971 - 2000 Royal Academy, London Summer Exhibitions, frequently selected

1973 Upper Street Gallery, Competition, London

1979 Critics’ Choice, London

1980 New Grafton Gallery, London

c.1980’s Sainsbury’s Images for Today
Gallery Valerie, Brompton Road, London
Bury St Edmunds Art Gallery, Suffolk

1982, 83 Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield (prize winner ’82)

1986 Thackeray Gallery, London
Beldesign, Cambridge

1987/88 Phoenix Gallery, Kingston/Pimlico; Highgate, London

1993 - 96 Alresford Gallery, near Winchester

1994 Bank Street Gallery, Sevenoaks

1994, 95 20th Century British Art Fair, RCA, Beardsmore Gallery, London

1994 - 2002 London Contemporary Art Fairs, Beardsmore Gallery, frequently selected

1995 ‘Looking Up, Looking Down’, Beardsmore Gallery

1996 ‘Seafairing’ New Ashgate Gallery, Farnham
Endangered Species, Christies

1997 City of London Art Fair, Beardsmore Gallery
Four Group, Beardsmore Gallery

1998 Chelsea Art Fair

1999 The Edge of the Land, with Jason Hicklin, Beardsmore Gallery

2001 Leighton House, London

2010 Winter Exhibition, Beardsmore Gallery

Collections

National Library of Wales

Graves Gallery, Sheffield

Abbot Hall Gallery, Kendal

John Player Collections, Nottingham

Primavera, Cambridge

Local authorities of: Leicester Educations Committee; East Riding, Yorkshire; W Riding, Yorkshire;

Lancashire; Sussex; Camden; Shropshire

Paintings in hospitals

Illustrations for ‘The Face of Winter’ by James Hanley, limited edition of 99 copies 1964

Shadowgraph Play for Theatre of Puppets, ICA, 1970