AMERICAN · BASED IN BUTTE, MONTANA

Mike Hamblin

Mike Hamblin is an American painter rooted in Butte, Montana — a town built on copper, Irish immigration and the high, hard light of the Northern Rockies. His work moves easily between the photographic and the painterly: precisely observed portraits of cultural icons and ordinary children alike; bone-honest still life of the objects of American life — pickup trucks, Harleys, oak whiskey barrels. He paints in oil on linen and in watercolour with the same patience, building images up through restrained glazes until the surface carries both the gloss of a memory and the weight of a thing actually seen. There is no romance here, and no irony — only an unflinching attention that turns the familiar into something close to portraiture.

Works by Mike Hamblin

Rosa Parks

35 × 25 cm

An intimate, unflinching portrait of Rosa Parks — silver hair, gold-rimmed glasses, a red scarf at her throat — painted with the patience and respect of a history sat for, not a history merely remembered.

€1,500

Pickpocket

100 × 50 cm

A young boy in an embroidered cap caught mid-action, palms turned up in a small theatre of innocence and intent — chiaroscuro lifted from the old masters, narrative pulled straight from the street.

€4,000

Chris Patterson

80 × 60 cm

Scottish rugby international Chris Paterson caught at the moment of placement, jersey damp, eyes fixed past the camera — a portrait of professional concentration distilled into a single quiet kneel.

€3,500

Jack Daniels on the rocks

90 × 120 cm

A Harley-Davidson loaded with a small oak whiskey barrel parked against a weathered green door in the Montana sun — sun-bleached chrome, Old No. 7 emblem, Permanent Montana plate. Watercolour at the upper limit of the medium.

€9,000