”John Hampshire is a virtuoso with a brush. …..viewers might imagine him handling his brushes like an orchestra conductor who waves his wand with punctuation and prowess. Portrait painters in need of inspiration should see this memorable show.”
”….John Hampshire’s In the Studio with Zephyr. An engrossing oil painting that deals simultaneously with the dynamics of anger and the intensity of creativity,…… it is so potent, so powerful…..the searing vision of its central figure is devastating.”
8/2002. Berkshire Home and Style Magazine. J. Peter Bergman
“John Hampshire's astonishing grid of 10 canvases bridges abstraction and realism. One of the area's most exciting young painters, Hampshire presents a series of small portraits that are carefully rendered in a tight, pointillist style. Around the edges of each canvas, however, the paint devolves into a jagged pattern of slashes, like a video transmission breaking up. The question -- is this chaos overtaking order, or order working to conquer chaos? -- gives these works their satisfying tension.”
“....’John Hampshire’s Recent Work’ fills the gallery with medium and large scale paintings made in just a two or three year period....The personality of the subject is heightened, as in a caricature, painted with an exaggerated, almost distorted sense of space and shape..........Hampshire consistently creates a surface that comes alive on its own terms. Here, the subject is of less obvious interest- a woman looking shyly..... His (Hampshire’s) new sensitivity to light, his more intense palette, and his carryover of the photograph’s blurred foregrounds all make for formally strong results.”
1999.
“ ... His portraits are strongly composed with powerful emotion and a surreal edge...”
1999. The Independent Sept. 2. "
“The omnipresence of John Hampshire’s portraiture in the capital region has made it easy to trace his experimentation with style. Laura, an oil on paper work, is an interesting example….. markings have been subdued in favor of a pointillist-television realism....which in turn evolves into something more akin to the agitation of Van Gogh. I couldn’t help but think of Chuck Close, but Hampshire’s Laura is generally more satisfying....”
1999. Metroland. Feb. 18. "Channel Surfing". Review by Stacy Lauren. Metroland. p. 21.
“And John Hampshire ...offers a grand, cautionary tableau in ‘An Artist’s Education: Adam Luscier in My Studio’, where the subject slumps in abject enlightenment amid artist’s trappings, graphic chaos knawing at the edges of the visual field”.
1997. Metroland. July 3. "Broad Strokes" Review by Rich Kriener. p.20
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