Artist Bill Hammond dies

Bill Hammond, one of the country’s most influential artists, has died aged 73.

The Christchurch-born and Lyttelton-based artist was noted for the environmental and socially-aware themes of his work and perhaps best known for his surreal bird paintings.

Bill Hammond’s Fall of Icarus is at the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū

Arts commentator Hamish Keith was one of the first to pay tribute - on Twitter describing Hammond as "a marvellous artist and a very lovely man".

Speaking to Radio New Zealand Keith also said Bill Hammond had “such a unique vision from the very beginning.”

He said while he was obviously sad for the artist’s family it was an enormous loss to New Zealand art.

“He made things out of who we are and where he was.

“He had a brilliant command of technique, a painter’s painter.”

Bill Hammond was born in 1947 and attended the Ilam School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury from 1966-1968.

nz-artists.co.nz says Hammond didn’t begin exhibiting his work until the 1980s.

“It didn’t take long for the New Zealand art community to take notice. Hammond’s was a distinctively individualistic ‘take’ on life, reflecting 20th century life in all its materialistic, aggressive, citified chaos, with inanimate objects seeming to take on a life of their own.

“By the mid-1990s, however, Hammond’s paintings had assumed a haunting beauty (‘Placemakers’ series). Gone was the black humour of that grunty, tough ‘underworld’. The clothed, half-human, half-bird creatures that now populated his canvases, adopting human stances and characteristics, conveyed a feeling of quiet despair or resignation as they gazed into the distance.”