Biography

Larry Ham was born in Newquay, Cornwall. After local education he attended Chelsea School of Art where he was taught drawing by Vivian Pitchforth. The enthusiasm for abstract painting of the 1950s was shared by Ham who saw many exhibitions in the capital. He exhibited in the legendary ‘Artists of Fame & Promise’ series at the Leicester Galleries and later, a west-end solo exhibition with the Cooper Gallery proved commercially successful. In 1958 Ham moved to Guernsey with his wife, where he painted powerful abstractions based on the recurring motif of figures against the landscape. He was close to France in more ways than one, his love of de Staël, Poliakoff and other French-based modern masters was influential on his own impastoed and simplified compositions. Guernsey Museum mounted a comprehensive memorial exhibition in 2009. A small monograph on Larry Ham by Peter Davies was published in 2010.