Be careful where you tread when stepping inside David Hampton’s home in Bath. There are artworks everywhere – not just hanging on the walls, but stacked against wardrobes, resting on tables and, somewhat unnervingly, lying on the floor around the doorway. There are paintings in acrylic, watercolour and oil – dazzling abstract swirls and French landscapes in deep greens and purples – as well as ceramics, playful sculptures, painted trays … even an old gate that’s been repurposed as a skinny figure holding a camera. It’s a lot to take in. But then, when you’ve been making art almost every day for eight decades, you do tend to accumulate a lot of stuff.
Hampton turns 98 this year and his home is a fascinating gallery documenting a monumental artistic journey – one that covers three floors of his house and spills over into an attic accessible via a stepladder (“I go up there occasionally,” he says, “but I’m maybe not feeling like it today”). It’s actually a slimmed down collection, as many of Hampton’s best works are currently on display at the city’s Pencil Tree Gallery. And if it hadn’t been for a fateful meeting with the gallery’s director, Kirstie Jackson, this astonishing body of work may easily have gone unrecognised by the wider world. Last year Jackson and her artist husband moved home just over the road from Hampton’s place. She noticed an elderly neighbour who would walk up and down the steep hill outside each day, and decided to strike up conversation.
