Royal Academy of Arts Magazine, London
Article
2025
In the 10 or so years that I knew him, Norman Hyams’s subjects proved few and consistent. Figures, landscapes and patterns return and repeat in his paintings, inspired as much by his teenage memories of growing up in London’s East End as they were by the numerous archival photographs and magazine cuttings littered throughout his studio. Among them were pictures of boxing bouts and the cropped corners of tennis courts, winding rows of suburban houses and children’s parties. ‘No rush’, he was known to say. Painting is a process of ‘teaching myself how to see’.
Hyams’s self-portraits were also many. He depicted himself as a father, reader, smoker, painter and butcher, peering from the shadowlands, nose and beard only, or flanked by theatre curtains in quiet abandon (Untitled (100), date unknown; above), or solemn in his studio, deep in thought. Minimally executed on the dark linen he favoured, his paintings balanced a strange and elusive melancholy with bullish optimism, facing himself and his favoured familiar subjects with honesty and patience, often incorporating bold colour.
Hyams attended Chelsea College of Arts later in life, graduating in 2006 at the age of 40 and later cutting his brushstrokes at the south London home for painters’ painters, Turps Studio. Visiting his studio, always brimming with canvases and sculptural experiments – piles of hand-painted objects in all materials, shapes and sizes – it was clear that he had an endless curiosity in the people and world around him.
Hyams passed away in the autumn of 2024, aged 58. ‘No Rush’, an upcoming solo show at Hannah Barry Gallery in Peckham (27 Nov to 24 Jan 2026) displays works not yet seen from that same studio, a glimpse into the mind of a painter unhurried by the march of time.
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