Robert Hamilton's Paintings On Display at BigTown Gallery

The BigTown Gallery on Main Street in Rochester will present "Excerpts from the Life- 1985-2004: Paintings by Robert G. Hamilton, through June 21.

In 1936, Hamilton came to the Rhode Island School of Design, firmly resolved to be the next Norman Rockwell. Instead, he met his teacher, John R. Frazier, who believed in art for art's sake.

Following service in WWII, Hamilton, facing his first Max Beckmann work, was stupefied by its incomprehensibility. A year later, the same painting spoke to him as El Greco, Valesquez, and Piero. He knew then he had found his path.

Hamilton's paintings rise straight up out of the wild improvisations of the Jazz Age, seeming to express in a singular and emphatic vision the entire procession of Western art. Wildly colorful, eccentric, at times elegiac, they en compass both personal history and canny artistic commentary, all out of metamorphosis and audacious, surprising arrivals.

Hamilton, who died in 2004, taught painting and drawing at the R.I.S.D. for 34 years. In 1981, he retired to Port Clyde, Maine, where he built two small galleries. He would paint all winter, then put up 30 or 40 new pictures, and invite people to take a look. He sometimes called it "the last free show on Earth."