“I made this thing… It was organic, but I painted it with a palette knife, and then I did three other paintings, the same kind of organic things. But I said, ‘A palette knife doesn’t work with this many curves. It’s too damn tedious.’ It relates to a brush. See? So I did organic paintings in 1964, maybe thirty or forty of them, one a day… Now, then the next step is the organic size, and I learned— It became conscious to me— Santa Barbara had a show Leonardo Visits Vinci. There was a small room. There were two of his drawings— You go this close to it, you see, and when I went that close, I’ll be a son of a bitch, it’s the size of my face, that shape. That drawing was the size of my face. So there’s a relationship. So the organic paintings are usually my face size, and then my arm size, and this [holds up hand] is snapshot size.” - Frederick Hammersley, 2005

See paintings by Hammersley from this period in his forthcoming exhibition Frederick Hammersley: Cut-ups and Organics, 1963-1965, on view at L.A. Louver, September 12 - October 18, 2014. A fully illustrated catalogue, with text by E. Luanne McKinnon, will accompany the exhibition.

IMAGE: Frederick Hammersley, Slip stream, 1964, oil on linen, 18 x 22 in. (45.7 x 55.9 cm), framed: 25 ¼ x 29 ½ in. (64.1 x 74.9 cm)