Be careful where you step as you enter David Hampton’s house in Bath. There are works of art everywhere – not just on the walls, but stacked against cabinets, resting on tables and, somewhat unnervingly, on the floor around the doorway. There are paintings in acrylic, watercolor and oil – dazzling abstract swirls and French landscapes in deep greens and purples – as well as ceramics, playful sculptures, painted trays… even an old gate converted into a thin figure holding a camera. It’s a lot to take in. But when you’ve been making art almost every day for eighty years, you tend to collect a lot of things.
Hampton turns 98 this year, and his home is a fascinating gallery documenting a monumental artistic journey—a journey that spans three floors of his home and culminates in an attic accessible by stairs (“I go there every now and then,” he says, “but maybe I don’t feel like it today”). It’s actually a pared-down collection, as many of Hampton’s best works are currently on display at the city’s Pencil Tree Gallery. And without a fateful meeting with the gallery’s director, Kirstie Jackson, this astonishing body of work could easily have gone unnoticed by the rest of the world. Last year, Jackson and her artist husband moved just across the road from Hampton’s home. She noticed an elderly neighbor who walked up and down the steep hill every day and decided to strike up a conversation.
“David told me he was an accomplished artist, so I knew he would be good,” she says, “but I didn’t expect him to be like this this brilliant.” She laughs: “My husband came away with the feeling that he had done nothing, that he would never make so many paintings!”
“Depends on how long you live, I guess,” Hampton interjects, smiling.
Jackson compares Hampton’s house to Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge and says she compares his work to that of Ben Nicholson, Terry Frost and other members of the St Ives School who had a major influence on British art in the 1950s and 1960s. But while these artists enjoyed widespread recognition, Hampton’s prolific output came a hesitant second to a teaching career. “Have I ever become bitter?” he wonders for a few seconds. “Not really, it’s just the way it was.”
Hampton was never one for self-promotion – in fact, this is his first interview ever – but he did have the advantage of coming from an artistic background. His grandfather was the famous sculptor Herbert Hampton and his father was also a painter and restorer. “Also a drinker,” says Hampton, describing a pretty tough upbringing in London. “We lived in very primitive conditions. Two rooms for the six of us on the top floor of a hut. An outside toilet and no hot water.”
When he was evacuated at the start of World War II, 13-year-old Hampton found his new home a significant upgrade. The war was still going on when he reached fighting age, so he was sent to serve in Palestine. “It was fun for six months, we wanted to go to the opera in Haifa,” he remembers. “Then the freedom fighters showed up and things got nasty. British soldiers would be killed.” When he was subsequently sent to Egypt, Hampton’s artistic ambitions began to blossom – he was fascinated by the light there, and the army agreed to fund pre-vocational training there in Egypt. “I guess it was some kind of reward for serving.”
Hampton studied at Kingston Art Academy and the Royal College of Art, but was discouraged from following his heart and exploring the new world of color opened up by artists like Matisse. “They didn’t understand it,” he says.
When you talk to Hampton you realize what a tremendous amount of art history and change he has lived through. “When I was a student at Kingston, they didn’t know anything about color,” he says, reaching into a stack of books and pulling out a copy of Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color. “They had not read any recent books by the American painters.” I’m amazed at how he knows where everything is in this gloriously cluttered artistic house, how he can quickly jump to the right page in an academic textbook to illustrate his point. Is daily painting what keeps him so sharp?
“Partially,” he says. “I think anyone who is creative has a better chance of living longer. But I am also interested in philosophy. And memorizing poetry. You can’t carry a painting with you, but if you’re feeling down you can always recite a Shakespeare sonnet.”
Hampton has never had a period without painting – “not apart from illness,” he says. I particularly like a coffee pot against a background of blues, or his series From the Nebula, in which thick, vibrant orange curves run across a pale background. He accepts modest praise and is keen to point out the works of his late wife Joan as he shows me around – she was also an accomplished painter, who died in 2004 after 52 years of marriage. “A great loss,” he says calmly.
Nowadays, Hampton prefers to work with pastels, probably because they are easier, he says. I ask how he keeps from repeating himself – or becoming jaded. “Variations,” he says, leaning toward the kitchen table on which lies a stack of perhaps twenty square paper towels, each with nine small ink drawings around a theme. They are minimal, intricate and quite beautiful, with the ink leaking into the absorbent material.
I wonder if he has embraced new technology, but I shouldn’t have asked. He picks up a nearby iPad with hundreds of colorful designs on it. “It can be questionable not to touch materials with your hands,” he admits, “but at the same time, good designs come out.” Apparently there’s an iPad somewhere with thousands of extra images on it, but it’s lost the charger for it.
Meeting Hampton is a testament to the power of art for art’s sake, not to mention the thrill of imagining what treasures might lie behind the walls of other modest homes. He has lived a fulfilled life – his daughter has taken up the artistic mantle with her love of recorder playing, while he says his son is more of a sporting type before adding: “He does like my work”. Despite his modesty, you sense that he finds this latest development in his artistic life a bit exciting.
“It’s a surprise,” he says of being given another exhibition at the age of 97 – not to mention an interview with the Guardian. “I thought this was the end.”
I’m not sure Hampton really thinks in terms of the ending, though. When we were walking around his house earlier, he found a pile of paintings that he glanced at but refused to show me. He said he wasn’t happy with how they turned out. And yet he still holds them? “Well,” he said, “I’m a little tired these days, but I hope to finish them someday.”