Jon Hammer is an artist working in New York City.
A word about the barroom paintings:
New York City maintains a perpetual state of nostalgia. Throughout our history, starting in the days of Peter Stuyvesant one suspects, to be a New Yorker has been to grumble constantly about how much of the best of our town we have lost. This is true whether the kvetcher is referring to a Golden Age thirty years or thirty days ago. To make these pictures I work in traditional materials as out-moded and slow as a Fifth Avenue Omnibus. The media are anachronistic and so are the subjects. I paint mostly old bars and restaurants because they are connections to the City of the memory. Many of them still exist. They are public spaces, where our fellow citizens interact, run as private businesses without the benefit of a corporate home office in Carrolton, Texas or Orlando, Florida. A few are already gone. Eventually the places that I paint may mutate into an unrecognizable form, or simply disappear. The pictures will remain a while longer.
jhammer13 @ nyc.rr.com is my email address. (Remove the spaces before and after the "at" sign to contact me.)
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