Lawrence Gordon Ham (1934 – 2007), more commonly known as Larry Ham was born in Newquay in Cornwall. He was trained at the Chelsea School of Art. There he met Vivian Pitchforth, war artist and yet another to make the connection between Wakefield and Cornwall (indirectly I know!). Whereas Pitchforth was more of a classical landscape painter Ham moved towards the more abstract colour field ideas from America.

Figures on a Beach is depicted in rich fields of colour and was painted shortly after the artist left Cornwall for Guernsey in 1958. It was here that he was influenced by the visionary French painter,Nicolas de Staël (1914-1955), Ham’s subjects became reduced to bold, semi-abstract forms and vibrant colour fields. The surface is richly worked oil paint mixed with sand, which creates a rough texture which has been applied thickly with broad flat brushes and a palette knife. This creates a feeling of presence at the beach. 

In his book, Larry Ham: Guernsey’s Cornish Born Artist, 2010, the art historian, Peter Davies says of the landscapes “In these Ham would experiment with the architectonics of scale and coloured surfaces – in a word abstraction, but with the material of paint.” Most of Ham’s paintings were abstract landscapes but he occasionally used his colour field thinking to paint football scenes. I was taken by Goal Save from 1982. I feel sure it is Peter Shilton saving from Arsenal’s big striker, Malcolm MacDonald!