Carnival Snowman

Caroline Douglas: I wanted to talk a bit about the Snowman. If there's a quintessential Gary Hume, it's the snowman. It's an abstract, geometric form, two forms. It's painting, it's sculpture. It recurs regularly and it has this inherent melancholy.


Gary Hume: Yeah, I went with Don Brown up to the Yorkshire Moors and made a snowman and dyed it with some food coloring. I made snowmen to take photographs and then, quite a while later, I decided I could make a painting and then, having made a painting, I could make a sculpture. When I make a snowman, I make a romantic thing. I observe it but it doesn't observe me back. Like looking at a landscape

(Gary Hume Flashback, exh. cat., London 2012, p. 24).