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 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