Meet Hamish Wilson
Oops, snorts Hamish Wilson. He’s standing in his home studio and painting, his brush has just left some unexpected rusty brown streaks in the soft background of his work. He blends it in with his hands and explains that it’s because he doesn’t clean his brushes, preferring to work with the unintentional texture of whatever came before.
Hamish is our feature artist for the May issue of Mav-Letter, he’s also the founder and editor of Artful Heads — a local arts and music magazine.
As we chat, I think this little display of surrender is pretty fitting. Aesthetically, Hamish’s work is mostly figurative, his deeply textured portraits are accentuated by thick contours of colour, collaged fabric, and recurring reference to Australian modernist painters. His subject is a recurring one, a man, which he describes as a half-self, half embodiment of the inner male psyche.
I think the style that I’ve developed is quite raw, and the aim initially was for the work to be easily accessible and visceral. I wanted to explore the reasons why we project a certain image of ourselves, the ways in which we cover up insecurities, and how people change in a relationship. I’ve got a lot to say about systems of masculinity, relationships and self-destructive behaviours, and in my practice, I am constantly grappling with how to express this.
The figure in all of these portraits (sometimes alone, sometimes wearing Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly helmet) is a personification of Hamish’s introspect; an examination of his concerns about how young men relate to each other, and to themselves — a kind of male proxy to look into shared experience.
Working on panels from Bunnings and using gap-filler as impasto, Hamish’s paintings temper blokeyness with a recurring floral motif. For him, flowers are a convenient symbol for many things; the romance we imagine for ourselves in a new relationship, the organic growth of an idea or a system of behaving, the wilting of insecurities and how we end up treating each other and ourselves.
I suppose the role of the artist in my mind is to be authentic and to speak honestly to their own understanding of the world in order to connect with people, to promote social cohesion, and highlight ways we as people can be better.
It also helps that I just like painting flowers
Hamish’s practice and his magazine were both started after he moved to Brisbane and found himself seemingly disconnected from an arts community. After a breakup left him questioning his sense of identity, he decided to explore both making and writing about art as a means of actualising what he wanted to see around him.
I started trying to live by this motto of ‘just taking the first step’. I was really interested in learning more about artists' practices, and I’d always loved print and had a ton of art books and magazines, so a magazine just seemed like a good way to explore all these avenues simultaneously.
Wanting to work against the fleeting nature of digital media, Hamish admits that it was a gamble to go with physical media for the magazine.
I honestly thought I’d only make one issue, lose all of my savings and that would be it. However I got a really nice response from friends and strangers alike, and that inspired me to keep going.
From there I started reaching out to stores to stock the magazine, and then hosting launch parties and curating art exhibitions, all of which I stumbled ass-backwards into.
This whole journey has honestly been so surreal, and has allowed me to meet so many incredibly interesting people that I otherwise may have never met.
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Check out Hamish’s artwork at @hamishwilson.art & magazine @artfulheads
Article by wonderful local arts writer Jessica McNicol @jemc & edited by @byfrances_
Photography by @rhiannajphillips