Black Paintings Transitioning Into Other Colors
With her husband, John Woodward, Ms. Woodward apparent Mr. Hambleton’s art, begin studios and abode for him and adapted for him. A accomplished nurse, she additionally abounding to abounding of his medical needs.
“He was so absorbing and so manipulative, but already you were in his apple you couldn’t agitate him,” Ms. Woodward said in an interview. “He had it. He didn’t affliction about the periphery. He would animate in a bag on the street. All he capital was acrylic supplies.”
A antic who admired to abet — as the bearding artery artisan Banksy has done aback the 1990s — Mr. Hambleton came to accessible absorption in the mid- to backward 1970s by painting faux crime-scene outlines of bodies on pavement and abacus “blood,” acquisitive to accomplish bodies accept that a consecutive assassin was on the loose.
He began this “Image Mass Murder” alternation in his hometown, Vancouver, British Columbia, and again took it bottomward the West Coast and beyond North America. He agitated clasp bottles abounding with white acrylic for the outline and red acrylic for the acted blood.
“I bethink barrier on one of them and cerebration it was a absolute abomination scene,” Penny Arcade, the achievement artist, says in “Shadowman,” a accessible documentary about Mr. Hambleton, directed by Oren Jacoby. Afterwards seeing addition outline, she says, she accomplished that “this may be article else, but I didn’t accept any accent for it.”
Mr. Hambleton advised maps to actuate where, in anniversary city, he would bang next.
“I began to anticipate I was murdering people, activity aback to my auberge covered in paint, blood, blood-red paint,” he says in the documentary, adding, “Blood has a admirable color.”
Announcing that “Dick Trace-It,” additionally accepted as Richard Hambleton, was the clandestine detective aggravating to break the “murders” in Vancouver, he acquaint 4,000 affected capital posters gluttonous the alarm of “Mr. Reee” for the crimes.
In 1980, anon afterwards affective to the Lower East Side, he started addition burghal art project, installing full-size accurate images of himself, dressed up in a clothing and tie and staring, on walls about the burghal and elsewhere. He alleged it “I Only Accept Eyes for You.” The images were printed on cardboard that connected aback aqueous and achromatic to white caliginosity afterwards three months.
His aboriginal “Shadowman” aeon led to adumbration images of bucking horses and riders on walls and canvases. By 1984, he had angry to the Marlboro Man, the cowboy amount whose blowing angel answer cigarettes for decades. Mr. Hambleton, who smoked, toyed with the image, painting adumbration abstracts over it, sometimes bond tobacco with atramentous acrylic for what he alleged a “black lung” effect.
Richard Art Hambleton was built-in in Vancouver on June 23, 1952. His parents, Arthur and Vale Hambleton, survive him, as do two sisters and a brother.
After admission from the Emily Carr University of Art & Design in Vancouver, he started the Pumps Center for Alternative Art, a gallery, achievement and video space, in the aforementioned city.
By the mid-1980s he had amorphous his alteration to creating astronomic seascapes, amid them agitated ocean-wave paintings. “I capital to do article that was a altered sensibility,” he says in the documentary. “It’s about love.”
Reviewing an exhibition of Mr. Hambleton’s paintings at the Piezo Electric Arcade in the East Village in 1985, Michael Brenson of The New York Times wrote that the abandon inherent in his aboriginal “Shadowman” assignment had not absolutely larboard him.
“There are three paintings alleged ‘Rainstorm,’ in which angry baptize seems to be hasty against us from aural the canvas,” Mr. Brenson wrote. “In anniversary of the paintings, sea and sky acerbity a bit added until they assume on the point of burning everything.”
Mr. Hambleton anon confused into his “beautiful” period, painting landscapes with gold and argent blade and brave varnishes.
But by the aboriginal 1990s he had amorphous to abjure from the art scene. Mr. Haring had died of AIDS at 31, Mr. Basquiat of a biologic balance at 27, and Mr. Hambleton, Ms. Woodward said, had become “paranoid about arcade ability and the appulse on the artisan and his freedoms.”
His activity had amorphous to unravel. His biologic use continued. His bark blight worsened. He lived in accretion squalor.
“His ambition was to ability the sublime,” Ms. Woodward said. “He acclimated drugs to get there. It was aloof who he was.”
In 2009, two art entrepreneurs cajoled him into bearing some new work, paintings of atramentous abstracts cutting suits, which were added to a attendant exhibition in New York sponsored by Giorgio Armani. For his documentary, Mr. Jacoby filmed Mr. Hambleton as he procrastinated and battled with his afraid patrons.
The show, which catholic to Europe the abutting year, was successful, and a improvement seemed possible. But the moment did not aftermost long. While Mr. Hambleton kept painting about until he died, he was acceptable more frail. His blight was acerbic his face. His aback was angled and askew from his analgesic conditions. He acclimated his folding bike as a walker. At times he was homeless.
“At atomic Basquiat, you know, died,” he says bitingly in the documentary, during a arena attempt in 2014. “I was animate aback I died, you know. That’s the problem.”
