David Hampton on painting and memorising poetry at 97: ‘Anyone creative is more likely to live longer’
Be careful where you tread when stepping inside David Hampton’s home in Bath. There are artworks everywhere – not just hanging on the walls, but stacked against wardrobes, resting on tables and, somewhat unnervingly, lying on the floor around the doorway. There are paintings in acrylic, watercolour 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 that’s been repurposed as a skinny figure holding a camera. It’s a lot to take in. But then, when you’ve been making art almost every day for eight decades, you do tend to accumulate a lot of stuff.
Hampton turns 98 this year and his home is a fascinating gallery documenting a monumental artistic journey – one that covers three floors of his house and spills over into an attic accessible via a stepladder (“I go up there occasionally,” he says, “but I’m maybe not feeling like it today”). It’s actually a slimmed down collection, as many of Hampton’s best works are currently on display at the city’s Pencil Tree Gallery. And if it hadn’t been for a fateful meeting with the gallery’s director, Kirstie Jackson, this astonishing body of work may easily have gone unrecognised by the wider world. Last year Jackson and her artist husband moved home just over the road from Hampton’s place. She noticed an elderly neighbour who would walk up and down the steep hill outside each day, and decided to strike up conversation.
“David told me he was a trained artist so I knew he’d be good,” she says, “but I hadn’t expected him to be this brilliant.” She laughs: “My husband came away feeling like he hadn’t done anything, that he would never make this many paintings!”
“Depends on how long you live I suppose,” interjects Hampton with a smile.
Jackson likens Hampton’s house to Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge and says she rates his work alongside that of Ben Nicholson, Terry Frost and other members of the St Ives School who were highly influential on British art throughout the 50s and 60s. But whereas those artists have had widespread recognition, Hampton’s prolific output took a reluctant second place to a teaching career. “Did I ever get bitter?” he wonders for a few seconds. “Not really, it’s just the way things were.”
Hampton was never one for selfpromotion – this is his first ever interview, in fact – but he did have the advantage of coming from artistic stock. His grandfather was the famous sculptor Herbert Hampton and his father was a painter and restorer too. “Also a drinker,” says Hampton, who describes a pretty tough upbringing in London. “We lived in very primitive conditions. Two rooms for six of us in the upstairs of a shack. An outside lavatory and no hot water.”
When he was evacuated at the beginning of the second world war, the 13-year-old Hampton found his new lodgings to be a significant upgrade. The war was still ongoing when he became of fighting age, and so he was shipped out to serve in Palestine. “For six months it was nice, we would to go the opera in Haifa,” he recalls. “Then the freedom fighters turned up and it got nasty. British soldiers would get killed.” It was when he was subsequently posted to Egypt that Hampton’s artistic ambitions began to flourish – he was mesmerised by the light there, and the army agreed to fund a pre-vocational course there in Egypt. “I guess it was a sort of reward for serving.”
Hampton studied at Kingston art school and the Royal College of Art but he was dissuaded from following his heart and exploring the new world of colour being opened up by artists such as Matisse. “They didn’t get it,” he says.
Chatting to Hampton you realise just what an enormous amount of art history and change he’s lived through. “When I was a student at Kingston they knew nothing about colour,” he says, reaching into a pile of books and pulling out a copy of Josef Albers’ Interaction of Colour. “They hadn’t read any of the recent books by the American painters.” I’m gobsmacked by how he knows where everything is in this gloriously cluttered artistic house, how he can quickly turn to the right page in an academic textbook to illustrate his point. Is the daily painting what’s kept him so sharp?
“Partly,” he says. “I think anyone who is creative is more likely to live longer. But I’m also interested in philosophy. And memorising poetry. You can’t carry a painting around with you, but if you’re feeling low you can always recite a Shakespeare sonnet.”
Hampton has never had a period without painting – “not apart from illness,” he says. I’m particularly taken with a cafetiere against a backdrop of blues, or his From the Nebula series in which thick vibrant orange curves across a pale background. He accepts praise modestly and is keen to point out his late wife’s Joan’s works as he shows me around – she was an accomplished painter, too, who died in 2004 after 52 years of marriage. “A great loss,” he says quietly.
These days, Hampton prefers to work in pastels, probably because they’re a bit easier, he says. I ask how he avoids repeating himself – or getting jaded. “Variations,” he says, and leans over to the kitchen table on which lies a stack of maybe two dozen squares of kitchen roll, each one containing nine small ink drawings around a theme. They’re minimal, intricate, rather beautiful with the ink leaking into the absorbent material.
I wonder if he’s embraced any new technology, but I needn’t have asked. He picks up a nearby iPad with hundreds of colourful designs on it. “It can feel dubious not touching materials with your hands,” he admits, “but at the same time, good designs come out of it.” Apparently there’s another iPad somewhere with thousands more images on it but he’s lost the charger for that one.
Meeting Hampton is a testament to the power of art for art’s sake, not to mention the thrill of imagining what treasures may lie behind the walls of other unassuming homes. He has led a fulfilled life – his daughter has taken up the artistic mantle with her love of playing the recorder, while he says his son is more of a sporty type before adding “he does like my work, though”. Despite his modesty, you sense that he finds this latest development in his artistic life a bit of a thrill.
“It is a surprise,” he says of getting another exhibition – not to mention a Guardian interview – at the age of 97. “I thought it was the end.”
I’m not sure Hampton really thinks in terms of the end, though. Earlier, when we were touring his house, he found a stack of paintings which he glanced at and then declined to show me. He said he was unhappy with how they turned out. And yet he’s still kept hold of them? “Well,” he said, “I’m a little tired these days, but I do hope to finish them some day.”
A Colourful Perspective: Paintings by David Hampton is at Pencil Tree Gallery, Bath, until 28 March