LUXE
Spring 2009

Excerpt
Max Hammond compares the process of painting to hiking. Some artists, he says, head for a particular “trail,” knowing just where it will lead them. “With my work,” says Hammond, “it’s more like picking a point off the side of a road and heading off into the desert with the aim of finding something really interesting—but having only a vague sense of how to get there.” His twenty-plus years of experience have taught him to savor the journey, trusting that he’ll eventually “stumble upon something that feels really right,” as Hammond puts it, “a place I need to be.” The finished painting, then, is a study or interpretation of that place.