Kerry Schuss Gallery

Press Release

R Ray Hamilton USA

 

Organized by Jay Gorney

 

May 6 - June 25, 2022

 

Kerry Schuss Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of drawings by Ray Hamilton organized by independent curator Jay Gorney. This will be the fourth exhibition of this artist’s work mounted at this gallery.

 Hamilton, born in 1919 in Hampton, South Carolina (died in New York in 1996) served in the Navy during World War II and moved to New York City after the war to work for the railroad. He began to draw in 1982 when he was a resident in an adult home in Brooklyn and a visiting artist introduced him to the red, blue and green ballpoint pens which became part of his artistic signature.

 Hamilton’s compositionally elegant ballpoint pen drawings depict both simple, everyday objects—a wallet, coins, dinnerplates, sunglasses--and remembered animals and scenes from his childhood farm.  His subjects are accompanied by text which sometimes identifies them, and always Includes his identifying signature:  R Ray Hamilton USA.  Both the placement of the text and the abstract properties of Hamilton’s distinctive lettering make his captions an integral part of his compositions.

 The drawings included in this exhibition were made before a stroke in 1990 which forced him to draw with his non dominant hand. These earlier works employ heavy slashes of his pen which emboss and almost score his paper.  The placement of Hamilton’s vividly drawn subjects and text on the page is invariably thoughtful and makes the ground of the paper an essential part of the works.

The sheer physicality of Hamilton’s pen strokes and the deep jewel-like tones created by his repeated marks of the ballpoint inks create drawings that are distinctive and often quite moving.  In one work, the dark drawing of a house silhouetted against the night sky becomes a brooding nocturne.  Hamilton’s drawing of a Ford can be read as a sophisticated abstract composition of blue, black and green geometric shapes, and these shapes are seen again in another increasingly abstract blue and green composition.

Although Hamilton’s connection to other artists who employ captions such as William Hawkins and Freddie Brice is clear, it’s fascinating for the viewer to think about Hamilton’s drawings along with those of Jasper Johns, another artist who creates masterful works on paper. Both explore the mundane and abstract properties of simple objects and text.  Both Johns and Hamilton create symphonies of gray tones and can imbue the simplest object with imbedded memory and biography.

Ray Hamilton’s drawings were first seen in “Art’s Mouth”, organized by Connie Butler for Artists Space in 1991, and have been included in exhibitions at the Abby Rockefeller Folk Art Center in 1997, and in numerous group exhibitions.  More recently, Hamilton’s work was included in a 2019 exhibition at White Columns which included work from the archives of Healing Arts Initiative. Ray Hamilton is included in “Self-Taught: Paintings and Drawings by Outsider Artists” (1993) by Frank Maresca and Roger Ricco. Hamilton’s drawings are included in the public collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the American Folk Art Museum in New York.