Fergus Hare
Born in 1977, Fergus studied at Camberwell College of Arts and Norwich School of Art for his degree. For many years Fergus was painting mainly landscape based work, working mostly outdoors in oil paint. It was around this time that he started to make charcoal drawings of the moon from a telescope, somewhat inspired by Galileo’s drawings, and his long running passion for the moon and space. They were exhibited in London, Munich and Essex, and were featured in Astronomy Magazine. These drawings are also discussed in the book Moon: Art, Science and Culture by Alexandra Loske and Robert Massey. Fergus’ work was shown alongside one of Constable’s paintings in the Brighton Museum and he would frequently be mentioned in lectures on Contemporary British Romanticism, and the moon in art.
From 2015 - 2023 Fergus was represented by New Art Projects in London and exhibited with them nationally and internationally. In 2022 the gallery published a book of his work with an essay by Jenny Uglow.
‘I started to create imaginary landscapes from the studio. I felt that those years working outside perhaps gave me the skills to work from my imagination more. I didn’t want to depict actual places anymore, but rather somewhere more ambiguous. In the last few years I have worked mostly in acrylics on brown paper or clear primed linen. I have been incorporating figures into my work again, working from a range of different source material.
‘The identity of the people and places in my paintings now, mostly, are not important and I want them to have a certain ambiguity. I sometimes just number my work too, as a direct protest of the literal titles I used to give my landscape work.
‘I’m still asked those questions from time to time, but I’m hoping people will understand when they see the vague titles and the sometimes lack of detail on the faces of the figures. Instead, I’m trying to capture character and personality through the shapes of their posture, and the way their clothes sit. I’ve started to treat these paintings as abstractions. For the most part, the gathering of the people in the paintings are random, and the compositions are often dictated by just shapes and colours. If I’m painting from photos I have taken, I’ll never ask someone to pose or say when I’m taking the photo. I’m not too interested in that.
‘I like to think about things in relation to the Cosmos. The definition of the Cosmos, as Carl Sagan put it, is everything there ever was, is, or ever will be. I like that everything can be united that way. I think that when my work is viewed as a whole, then I can see that there might appear to be lots of different things going on, but to me it’s all one thing.’
Fergus Hare 2024
Contact Natasha with any enquiries.
