Landscape Painting with Hugo Hamper-Potts

Hugo Hamper Potts’s latest series of works, currently being exhibited at the Drake’s store in London on Savile Row, documents a series of lone trees sprouting up and out of the harsh and relentless landscape of the city.

They are real trees in real spaces. Fledgling, fragile, blooms of nature Hugo observes on his walks around the city, in Paddington, Hammersmith, Stockwell. They are markers that map his daily life, next to motorways and new build apartment blocks, against a purple night sky and along the side of the Thames.

When I visit his studio in Stockwell, Hugo, a tall wispy blond figure in paint covered loafers and a long warm coat, is waiting outside for me, smoking. He points out one of the trees he painted for the exhibition, it’s a small, fragile sapling, verdant and pure, foregrounded by a parking lot and framed by industrial rooftops.

“These urban trees feel so young. Maybe it’s about new beginnings. A bit of optimism against the jadedness of everyday life.”

Hugo makes us both coffee and starts rearranging the stacks of huge canvases that line two of the walls of his studio. One of the others is given over to the actual work of painting, and all the abstract accumulations of detritus from oil painting. The fourth wall is covered with small portraits of friends.

He’s only recently started painting London in detail. He shows me some works he’s been making recently of the Thames, all fragrant deep mud and brown water, and jokes that the Thames is the easiest river to paint, miming the minimal lines needed to accurately capture the angle of the banks.

He doesn’t paint en plein air, relying instead on the routine and habits of walking, looking, photographing, to form images. But within this there is a process of reduction and addition, taking away and adding things to the images, they aren’t documents of what he sees, but interpretations.

“Faces change in the same way landscapes change, hair recedes and rocks erode, and smoking catches up with you, and the way you see a landscape with your eyes is never the same way as you capture it in paint.”

We start by talking about Alan Watts, British philosopher and writer, whose dulcet tones in the hours of recordings he made on Taoism, Zen Buddhism, and man’s place in nature, inspired much of this body of Hugo’s work.

There’s a quote from Watts that he particularly likes: “We do not come into this world, we come out of it, as leave from a tree.” And which he says goes some way to explaining his approach to landscape painting, which is that we are an extension of the world, and there’s something beautiful about our relationship to nature, even in the inhospitality of the city. Similarly, he reveals something human in the landscape, primordial in the life of the city, and changing in the still life of a face.

“In a landscape everything is connected, whereas the tree in the city is not connected to anything. There’s not really any history to these urban trees, I really liked that about them. There’s something about the tree standing there like a person, looming, isolated but independent, especially independent from the city. These urban trees feel so young. Maybe it’s about new beginnings. A bit of optimism against the jadedness of everyday life.”

The exhibition’s works grew out of a bit of a quarter life crisis, Hugo jokes. He would walk around at night, and see these trees, all alone in the landscape, and they seemed to mirror how he felt. He started working on the series and then, coming back to it a year later, he realised that he had initially mistaken their isolation for hope. “On a second viewing they looked much less melancholic, and that kind of became the theme.”

Hugo grew up playing in bands, before heading to Florence to study painting in Florence. He went there on a whim and enrolled in the art academy. He found the process of learning there too mechanical though. “It became more about a technical method than anything creative, but I did learn to draw very well from it,” he recalls now, and he came back to London and committed to painting fully.

“I work a lot from memory. The landscapes especially, I’ve walked those paths so many times that I know the way they look when the light and seasons change, and I carry all of that in my head.”

He’s spent a lot of time in Scotland painting over the years, finding new perspectives on a landscape he knows well through family connections, and also through the work of the painter Michael Andrews. Hugo shows me a large finished painting of his, a lush green hill, creeping trees, a dark black river and bleached,weather beaten. Rocks. Andrews painted this same area many times, and was buried nearby.

I work a lot from memory. The landscapes especially, I’ve walked those paths so many times that I know the way they look when the light and seasons change, and I carry all of that in my head. Sometimes I’ll combine elements from different times, different walks, different memories. It’s not about being photographically accurate, it’s about capturing the feeling of a place, the atmosphere,” he explains.

This kind of thinking runs through all of Hugo’s work, whether it's a tree in an urban landscape, the Scottish wilderness, the Thames, or a portrait of a friend, there’s a reduction of background noise to focus on the emotional heart of the subject, whatever that is.

“I never idealise the face,” he says, of painting portraits. “Faces change in the same way landscapes change, hair recedes and rocks erode, and smoking catches up with you, and the way you see a landscape with your eyes is never the same way as you capture it in paint. I’m always trying to put some motion in, a movement towards feeling. In Scotland the landscape is so historical, the glaciers ripped through it, they’re like wrinkles on a face I suppose.”