Press

I once worked for a house painter who blasted Captain Beefheart’s Run Paint Run Run (sample lyric: ‘You’ve got hot paint and yer havin’ fun’) from a boombox lashed to our swing stage, suspended four stories above the street. Poet, musician, and painter, Van Vliet and the Captain are one and the same Renaissance man, and this group of paintings displays all of his talents. A tall canvas with the lyrical title Parapliers the Willow Dipped (1987) features vague figures, some heavily outlined in brushy black, and cymbal-cras bursts of emerald green and purple. Van Vliet often paints thick white over fat drips, giving his surfaces the rough, elementally grand spirit of cave paintings. In the back gallery are Hammond’s more formally elegant, smaller paintings, some of which feature a red-and-white-checked tablecloth pattern in such shapes as pipes and eyeglasses. The allusion to café languor is tempered by the artist’s method of attaching his brushes to a power drill and slathering macaroni-like spirals across the surface, lending the images a blurry, diaphanous depth.